Covid Political Wars Have Lost All Meaning

John Duffy

It happens in war that often the point is lost, and people continue to fight just because all they can remember is fighting. It could be the Hatfields and the McCoys continuing a multi-generation family blood feud, or the US empire spending twenty years in Afghanistan to the tune of about two-trillion dollars to accomplish, what again exactly? Bin-Laden something, Taliban, something-something, women’s rights, uh what again?

The political culture wars that began with the COVID19 pandemic under Trump that have largely been fought on social media platforms and in the major media, have gone so far off the rails that nothing really makes sense anymore. Despite the existence of vaccines that appear to be quite good at preventing serious illness or death from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the establishment media is still going hard about everything from masks, to the unvaccinated, to rising (but never falling) case numbers wherever they can find them.

Take this headline from CNN:

Three states are seeing about 40% of the country’s new Covid-19 cases

The article states:

“This week, just three states Florida, Texas and Missouri, three states with lower vaccination rates accounted for 40 percent of all cases nationwide,” Zients said at a White House news conference. “For the second week in a row, one in five of all cases occurring in Florida alone. And within communities, these cases are primarily among unvaccinated people.”

Before we dive into the numbers themselves, let’s all do a little mental exercise, and travel way, way back to March of 2020, and remember what exactly was so concerning about the developing situation with COVID19. There were concerns that people wouldn’t have pre-existing immunity, there were concerns that hospitals would be overrun, and there were concerns that there would be mass fatality events made worse by a collapsing healthcare system.

What has changed since then? For one, doctors have worked diligently to figure out very effective treatment protocols for people hospitalized with COVID19. Remember too, in the US, only between 1% and 5% of people who get infected with SARS-CoV-2 will even need to go to a hospital, and most of those people have at least one of four conditions; obesity, diabetes, hypertension, or heart failure. We also learned to not immediately thrust every sick patient on mechanical ventilation, which ended up being responsible for harming many people early in the pandemic.

Two, d’uh, there are vaccines available. These might be a touchy subject depending on who you’re talking to, but the point is, they exist, and we can see from half a year of using them that by and large, they are pretty good at preventing people who come down with COVID19 from having a serious illness, let alone dying. So if you’re old, or have the common comorbidities, and are thus scared of COVID19, guess what? There’s a shot for that!

Three, a crap ton of people have had COVID19, myself included! Official numbers put the count at 35 million Americans, but the real number must be much larger, due to asymptomatic infections and low early testing. Research shows that people whose immune system fights of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, retain a strong immunity against the virus, not only with antibodies, but at the level of the T-Cell. And if you don’t believe the studies on this, just use common sense. If reinfection was a high likelihood, we would already be seeing this happen in droves across the globe, and we aren’t.

Of course, the CDC and the media keep conveniently forgetting to mention acquired immunity when they talk about overall herd immunity in the US, and I cannot fathom why -cough- big pharma -cough- but when we add up the roughly fifty percent of the population that has been vaccinated with the perhaps another twenty percent who have now fought of the virus (and haven’t gotten the vaccine), and then tack on to that the children who are very unlikely to contract the illness, and we look like we are getting very close to numbers we need to no longer fear future “waves” of infection.

However, COVID19 will likely always be with us now. That’s my bet anyway. So there will always be people catching it, passing it, and in very rare circumstances, dying from it – mostly people who are already either elderly, or who have other illnesses. Is this something we should be concerned about? I mean, sure, but only if we keep it in perspective. We should be concerned with all issues of human health, like cancer, obesity, childhood diabetes, and somewhere in there, with attention granted at a level proportional to the harm caused, yeah, the lingering SARS-CoV-2 virus.

But that’s not what we’re seeing in the media. To scroll through the headlines and the twitter posts, you’d think it was November 2020 again. You’d think there was no shot you could go get for free that would nearly guarantee that COVID19 is reduced to a case of the sniffles. Instead we see much handwringing about the unvaccinated as if they are somehow ruining everything, as if their choice not to vaccinate somehow makes your own vaccine less effective. New York City’s Mayor Bill DeBlasio said on MSNBC:

“We’ve got to shake people at this point and say, ‘Come on now.’ We tried voluntary…The voluntary phase is over…I’m saying voluntary alone doesn’t work,” he added. “It’s time for mandates, because it’s the only way to protect our people.”

Why is this the angle? Why keep trying to compel every single human to get a COVID vaccine? If you want one, you can have it, and it will offer you a high level of protection. If you had COVID19 already, you probably don’t need one. If you’re very young, again, you probably don’t need one. And if you’re just not interested, that’s fine too! It does nothing to me if I am one of the other three categories! I can disagree with your choice to abstain, but at the end of the day, if I am vaccinated, your choice is not my concern.

Let’s get real for a minute: There will never, ever, ever be any social policy that is adopted by one-hundred percent of the people in a free country. You could offer free cupcakes and twenty dollar bills, and there would be keto-dieters and Randian capitalists who would turn down both.

But let’s get back to the CNN headline I posted at the top of this article. Let’s look at the three states driving the “cases” in the US; Missouri, Texas, and Florida. Yes, if we go to Worldometers, we see that their case numbers have gone up. However, we should note that last summer, we saw a rise and fall of cases in the southern states, and this very likely was a seasonal effect, possibly caused by more people sequestering indoors against the heat, in spaces where they were sharing air due to the HVAC systems (but who knows, really). The point is, this case bump isn’t unexpected, and currently, it looks as though this summer’s rise in cases, is ultimately smaller than last year’s:

What’s more important than cases, however, are deaths. So how does Texas look on that front?

Texas is currently running at about thirty deaths per day from COVID19, according to Worldometers. According to this link between 150,000 and 200,000 Texans die every year. So using an average of 175,000, and dividing that by 365 days of the year, on average, about 479 people in Texas die every single day, bringing COVID19 in as the cause of 6% of the current death in Texas. According to this data on Texas from ten years ago, cancer and heart disease on average each kill just over one-hundred Texans every day (this number has almost certainly risen in the last decade as well), and there is no vaccine for either! Also, odds are, the thirty or so people dying from COVID19 right now mostly come from the same pool of people who would be dying of that heart attack or cancer.

Florida looks basically the same, averaging about thirty-five deaths per day from COVID19:

And here is Missouri, which in the last few days is averaging a whopping three deaths per day (including a big zero posted for yesterday):

So what are we even fighting about? Why are there still so many scare headlines about COVID19? Even the states that are supposedly driving the summer surge, have very little actual dying. There is no threat of hospital overrun or service rationing. Immunity is rampant, whether from previous infection or inoculation. Everything that made the pandemic threatening in the spring of 2020, is no longer at play!

To me it looks like the media cannot let go of its COVID cash cow, the pharmaceutical companies want to milk every last dollar from the public teet, and the politicians and, ugh, “influencers,” who have made a name for themselves online constantly insinuating that COVID19 is an equal opportunity killer that is waiting to snuff out your family in the night, desperately love the attention they get whenever they tweet about how the selfish antimask/vax/science rubes are killing all the world’s grandmas. But let’s be real, summer 2021 is vastly different from summer (or spring!) 2020. The people who keep living in last year aren’t doing so because they give a damn about you or I, they are doing it because last year was very profitable for the billionaire class, for Pharma, for Amazon, for cable news, or for their own personal brand.

Further, the opportunities for power grab presented by the pandemic were just too succulent for most politicians to want to just hand over. These people know that the next few decades of human existence on planet Earth are going to be rife with challenges, and they don’t want walk headlong into those challenges without first buttoning up a few things in the realm of the technological, full spectrum dominance. That is the likely foundation of the push for full vaccination and digital passports of some kind, for the shame campaigns and attempts to block unvaccinated people from certain aspects of public life, for the uptick in fear based headlines and the with-us-or against-us style rhetoric when it comes to getting the jab.

So what are we even fighting about? Does anyone even remember? From what I can tell, we’re fighting about power in the coming century, but those who plan to wield it are pretending it’s for your own protection.

One Reply to “What Are We Even Arguing About?”

  1. All the old and weak uman animals that had to die from flu and/or pneumonia already died, that’s why the numbers of deaths are being less… At some point in time the flu/pneumonia can’t kill anymore!

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