is it pandemic season again already?

(and i still had my thanksgiving decorations up)

as many seem to be suddenly pointing out: there is a new “mystery pneumonia” alleged to be “tearing” through china.

leaving aside questions of “why on earth would you trust china’s take on literally anything, especially epidemiology?” there has been some sort of crud going around the US lately. i had it last week. it was never serious, just sore throat, mild cough and enough congestion to truly make me wonder if snot is somehow outside rules about conservation of matter, but seems widespread and it took 6-7 days to get over. it’s all over PR, friends in NY and california have it, it’s widespread. but yeah, guess what? it’s crud season. this happens every year.

the panic industrial complex is leaping into high gear to push masks, jabs, and testing but this is all bunk.

some of it is just pedestrian anxiety

and some of it profit mongering to push needless products

but in the middle of this, something ugly is starting to rear its head. a whole bunch of folks are suddenly fixating on this because “pro-med was the group that was warning about covid early”

it’s getting spun into some pretty dramatic conspiracy ideas.

but i would caution against jumping into this mindset. it’s rooted in all manner of fallacy, not least of which is a frequency fallacy. how many times has pro med warned of something and been wrong? how often has it come to nothing? saying “well, they were early on covid” is not actually meaningful if covid was just one of 100 times they cried wolf and the other 99 were nothingburgers.

does anyone actually know? (i don’t but it would be my odds on bet)

pro med is basically a chicken little advocacy group for global structures and more funding for people like them.

these guys do this all the time. all the health agencies do. all the media does. h1n1, zika, dengue, ebola, monkey pox, it goes on and on over and over, an evergreen meme always seeking to frighten and hoping to get lucky as a broken clock telling accurate time.

it's stunningly irresponsible and self-serving.

health agencies would tyrannize us all if it got them bigger budgets and more power.

journos would burn the world if it sold papers.

it’s not at all shocking to see them try.

what’s shocking is seeing anyone actually fall for it.

and you should NOT fall for it.

it’s simply and flatly false that pandemics are dangerous to modern societies. they just plain aren’t. but panic is.

panic is how you get massive, enduring iatrocide where care gets abridged, misapplied, twisted, and forced. it’s how you abandon what works and start doing crazy things and making bets on new drugs that have not been tested or understood. it’s how you kill millions by just plain being too scared to think straight.

so let’s not do that again, shall we?

let’s ignore this asinine invitation to surrender our wits and our liberties and succumb once more to the weaponized empathy wielded by the addled and anxious that they might call it virtue.

by giving credence to these epidemiological campfire stories we have brought out the worst in weak people and grifters alike.

they are gearing up for another round of fission grade stupid and would thrill to once more run roughshod over lives and liberty for fun, for profit, and for power.

the lies are all the same lukewarm rehashes of threadbare nonsense. we needed to do it harder. we needed to to it earlier. real lockdown has never been tried.

it’s tiresome totalitarian twaddle from the team who happens to like and benefit from these awful outcomes.

clearly some pretty rigorous science going on right there…

but we’ve all seen this movie before. we’ve seen how the trick is done.

it’s time for the societal immune system to kick in and remember.

a lot of people got fooled last time by a sense of need to “do something” and pseudoscience and scare tactics dressed up as empathy, epidemiology, and common sense.

never again.

these people cannot be given the time of day, much less an inch of leeway. we’re all seen how hard it is to stop a panic once it’s rolling.

it needs to be stopped now, before it starts.

grandma was right: “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”