A Daily Post reader sent me a link, last Friday, to a YouTube video. A couple of exasperated men, sharing their frustration with public health ‘stay at home’ orders in California. The 20-minute video was posted by “The Next News Network” with the title:
BREAKING! This ER Doctor Just NUKED Fauci’s Pandemic Fraud Straight to Hell!
You can view the video here if you wish. I watched about five minutes of it, which was probably too much. Inviting angry men into your home via YouTube is not something I can recommend during these troubled times.
My hat is off to courageous healthcare workers during this pandemic — ER doctors and everyone else on the front lines — but we recognize that doctors (and YouTube commentators) are just as likely to be confused about what’s happening, and what the data really means, and what a person’s life is worth, as anyone else.
Not that I blame these men for being angry. I understand their perspective, and I know what it feels like… when you’re so frustrated by your feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness, that you absolutely need to blame someone.
Dr. Fauci is an easy target, if you need to blame someone. Donald Trump is another easy target. Jared Polis is yet another. You can easily blame the Chinese government. You can blame Fox News.
The folks who assembled the video linked above would obviously like to blame the public health industry for recommending an economically damaging social policy — “stay at home; close your businesses temporarily” — instead of letting the pandemic run wild, as we do with the flu and some other viral infections.
Except that we don’t let the flu run wild in the US. We aggressively vaccinate older people in the US, because we have a vaccine that has certain protective qualities. We don’t have a vaccine for COVID-19. Nevertheless, many of us are scratching our heads, wondering if Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates and the ‘lock-down’ proponents have made a massive error that will end up, in the long run, ruining everyone’s life, just to save a few hundred thousand lives.
Personally, I am scratching my head and wondering how the public health industry managed to accomplish this massive lock-down. Yes, we all understand that reasons offered by the public health industry. Ostensibly, we stayed at home to avoid overloading the healthcare system. New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Washington DC are held up as examples of ‘too little, too late.’ Same with Spain and Italy.
Colorado, so far, seems to have avoided the worst effects of hospital overloading, but we have one of the highest death rates (measured per total population, not per ‘confirmed cases’) of the states in the American West. Only Washington State, here in the West, has seen a higher rate of fatalities.
The question that concerns me, at the moment, is “How did this happen?” How did the public health experts get their hands on the economy, and convince everyone to stay home for a month — or longer — and shut down their businesses, and suffer from isolation and anxiety?
We’ve seen 42,000 deaths in the US in the past two months — compared with, for example, a total of 114,000 US fatalities from the Asian flu in 1957-58. (It certainly appears we will surpass the Asian flu total, since we’re only about a couple of months into this thing.) But I don’t recall the economy shutting down during the Asian flu. I was only five years old at the time, but the internet histories I’ve found don’t mention a global economic shutdown. That said, we have no idea how bad COVID could have been by this point in April, if we’d done nothing. Nor will we ever know.
But we did, in fact, shut down our economies to prevent a pandemic potentially much worse than the Asian flu. And we’re going to remain mostly shut down, for a while longer.
But how the heck did that happen? I personally feel it was the right thing do at the time, but I’m still amazed that the public health industry pulled it off, in a society that measures almost everything — and especially ‘success’ — in terms of money. We measure, for instance, the value of education mainly in terms of ‘future wages.’ We measure successful government policies in terms of ‘economic growth.’ We often measure ourselves and our individual worth by the size of our house and our bank account.
In 1957, we suffered through a similar pandemic — the Asian flu — without shutting down the economy. What was different, here in the US, in 2020?
A few important things have changed, I’d say. I will be discussing the healthcare industry itself in a future installment. But first I’d like to touch on one huge difference between 1957 and 2020. The Internet.
Like, for example, Facebook.
I’m sure many Daily Post readers are aware of the similarities between certain aspects of our lives, in 2020, with the dreadful lives of “Party members” in the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, written by George Orwell and published in 1949.
If you’re familiar with that fictional story, you remember that, in the year 1984, every house, and street corner, and restaurant, and office was under surveillance through a massive system of ‘telescreens’ that simultaneously served up government propaganda while observing every move, every minute of the day, of every “Party member” — the ruling class of bureaucrats. This was a world where “Thought Police” monitored actions, movements, and conversations in a effort to stamp out any behavior that threatened the oppressive status quo.
Here are a couple of comments from “The Orwellian Danger of Facebook” by columnist Steven Hill, posted on TheGlobalist.com in April, 2018:
Is Mark Zuckerberg really in control of Facebook? Or is he a sorcerer’s apprentice that cannot handle the invention?
Virtually every month now, new controversies emerge swirling around Facebook. With its two billion users worldwide, Facebook has grown from a pet project started in Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm to become far more than a social networking platform.
It has morphed into a huge news, entertainment and advertising platform with two billion users that is viewed by more people than any US or European television network, any newspaper or magazine and any online news outlet.
The key difference between the frightening, government-controlled ‘telescreens’ in Orwell’s dystopian novel, and the Facebook-enabled iPhones carried by nearly every young or middle-aged person in America, is that we’re doing this willingly — of our own volition. When we use Facebook — or dozens of other apps — we willingly send Big Brother reports on our activities, our thoughts, our political beliefs, our photographs, our travel from place to place, our social networks, our plans, our shopping habits, our preferences, our health status…
All the while, believing that Facebook is harmless.