the greatest damage from covid has not been from respiratory virus

it has been from mental illness (and this illness has long been spreading)

covid did damage and took lives. how much and how many (and how many were near end of life already) is debatable, but when you look back remember several things:

1. none of these mitigations worked. not lockdowns, not masks, not vaccines. none are showing drops in all cause mortality and many correspond to rises and to greater covid spread. the vaccines could not even show all cause mortality benefit in their own trials. (and that was back when they were up against a variant they were designed for)

2. these purported mitigations had monstrous costs economically, educationally, and on every mental health metric you’d care to name. people got depressed, anxious, alienated, agoraphobic, germophobic, and suicidal. drug abuse and self harm soared. child development stagnated.

3. and every single bit of this was predictable. it was known and knowable. 100 years of evidence based pandemic guidelines literally screamed “do not do these things, they don’t work and the costs are dire!” it took me about 15 minutes back in march 2020 to find them and a couple hours to read them. they were neither subtle nor hard to read.

example: (from US biosecurity and bioterrorism, 2006, igelsby, now mostly scrubbed from the open access internet. make of that what you will…)

and yet we did not follow them. we threw them out the window and did the diametric opposite of what they told us to. the lunatics grabbed ahold of the asylum and have been taking us on a hallucinatory hijacking into cargo cult medicine and evidence denial ever since.

the covid outcomes in places like sweden that eschewed lockdown and masking look better than most (and top of the class on all cause deaths which we utterly normal).

and the entirely predicable mass-scale harms and disruption savaged the world were all self-inflicted wounds.

it was avoidable. it was a complete and total own goal that, at best, bought nothing for covid abatement at the highest non-wartime global price ever paid.

and it’s likely quite a lot worse that that.

and this was obvious going in.

and we did it anyway.

if you’re not going to call that crazy, i’d love to hear your definition.

and this is why i describe most of the damage from covid as harm from mental illness.

the folks allegedly in charge got the whole world so riled up that they became pathological loons pursuing nothing but panic and incapable of rationality.

because that’s what fear does. it stops nuanced thought and heightens demand for simple solutions, loudly shouted.

notions of cost benefit or even rudimentary trade offs or risk assessment vanished. we became sheep bolting around a pasture in a thunderstorm and the great many educated and credentialed people proved how useless they are in a crisis. this was not about smart or schooled, this was about:

can you handle fear and make good choices under pressure and when scared?

can you resist mob panic?

can you, when stood on your head and shocked straight to the medulla oblongata still think logically?

and more so than nearly any other group, our doctors failed us miserably. clearly, this is not true of all doctors. there are some great ones, men and women who stood tall and stayed calm and asked questions and found working solutions. people who bravely faced down the assaults of mob misrule and hospital lunacy and medical board suppression. but they were the few.

the many lost their minds and became bizarre performative germaphobes and superstition slinging shamans ready to do to you whatever they were told to against and in spite of the evidence of their own eyes and ears and education.

and you need to factor this into your life plans going forward. doctors are great and doctors know stuff, but many of them have become very, very ill.

and they are a vector for disease spread.

consider that this guy is a practicing pediatrician:

he’s not only doing this and seeking to normalize it, he thinks it’s brag worthy.

look who he lauds:

now think back to 2019. if you saw people like this on the street and someone told you “this is for a disease less dangerous to children than flu” what would your reaction have been?

pity? fear for the baby? it certainly would not have been “wow, i should copy that!” and yet actual fricking pediatricians are landing there.

the doctor is sick indeed.

and the illness is catching.

monkey see, monkey do and the victims are frequently those who cannot defend themselves and did nothing to deserve this.

onset of symptoms was rapid.

we went from “implausible dystopian movie device” to “this is your child’s life” in about 2 weeks. (and these were the “lucky” kids who got to have a life at all)

and some of the cases got really severe.

look at this and tell me it’s not a mental illness.

i double cat dare you.

we took the whole world and turned it into a celebration of anxiety and maladaptation. wet pants panic was elevated to virtue and desperate tribal signaling to community mindedness.

and if the doctors had spoken against this, we could have stopped it. most were not this crazy. most were just too scared to stand up to the ones who WERE crazy and feared the consequences of doing so. this is why the consequences keep getting ever more dire and medical boards and governments want to platform those that speak and threaten their certification to practice medicine.

that, my friends, is a basis for technocratic tyranny.

declaration of independence signatory benjamin rush was a lousy doctor who practiced abject quackery around bleeding, calomel purges, and tobacco smoke enemas; but he was a deep and prescient thinker. his words ring stunningly true today:

"Unless we put Medical Freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship…to restrict the art of healing to one class of men, and deny equal privilege to others, will be to constitute the Bastille of Medical Science. All such laws are un-American and despotic and have no place in a Republic…. The Constitution of this Republic should make special privilege for Medical Freedom as well as Religious Freedom."

he speaks here not just of the right to medical freedom and bodily integrity, but against medical boards, guilds, and certification. he wants a free market and not a credentialed class of oligopolists who may be controlled by their regulators, acceditors and governments and thus become a tyrannical extension thereof.

the bastille of medical science he describes is exactly what we got.

and it’s time we escaped that prison. medical credentialism and the threat of revocation is being weaponized against we the people. such practices and processes need to do separated from the state and made voluntary and competitive. let certification authorities compete to assure us of their assessments. let the people decide what sufficiency look like. perhaps current standards are too strict. perhaps they are too lax. there is no way to know until you break government monopolies and allow a market to answer that question.

it’s fundamentally anti-liberty and anti-human to place the state between a practitioner of medicine and their patients.

that’s basic free association and should be rendered free again.

sure, there might be some ill results from doing so, but will they really exceed in danger that which we just saw? of suppression of treatment, study, and speech to push dodgy solutions whose harm was vast and benefit illusory?

because this is the trade off.

you can have free association and contract, or you can have guilds and state sanctioned commerce.

the former may have some bad outcomes, but at least they will be YOUR bad outcomes, outcomes you chose. and with free market medicine, doctors will be able to aggregate and report on results and proficiency, unlike today.

or, this guild can become the choke collar of authoritarian imposition. think back to every covid imposition. they always used “safety agencies” who need to certify you to engage in consensual commerce.

health inspectors closed restaurants and gyms and theaters by threatening permits. medical boards and state pharma regulators banned treatment or even discussion of it. OSHA closed offices. the FAA piled pointless misery on flying. it goes on and on. systems and censorship are sold as safety and then those systems and censors are turned upon the people as societal suppression.

we may have had a good run, but that which was once weaponized is not easily beaten back into ploughshares.

we’ve gone too far to allow old normal back.

we’re not going to just return to being civil and reasonable, not once they have tasted this.

and this is applicable to everything.

they will drum up endless emergencies and use them to abridge and invalidate rights.

health, climate, education, social policy, gender, race; it’s all an emergency now. all a war.

this cancer is metastatic.

every field is run by people with the same sense and sensibility of a pediatrician in a gas mask trying to fit a baby into a plastic PAPR carrier.

and this is not a safe situation.

the toxic anxiety of the credentialed classes has run pandemic long enough.

such people must not be given power over others.

in the end, it’s very simple:

emergency powers are just another name for lawlessness.

you can be a nation of rights and laws or a nation of emergency.

you cannot do both.

the selection is binary and once these rubicons are crossed, there is no going back.

a choice will have to be made between an free society with personal responsibility or technocratic subjugation masquerading as safety.

choose wisely.