We've Got To Stop Pretending COVID Is Over
Hiring Pollsters To Tell You What To Say, And Other Diversions
When I joined Twitter in the early 2000s, I saw it as a grudging capitulation to the tech trends of the time. All my friends in Music, Business, and Tech were being told they needed to have a “presence” on this platform, so we dutifully, if grudgingly, signed up. I was extremely skeptical, after all, what was the point of LIMITING letters and words and phrases? Wouldn’t that trivialize communications on complex issues that demanded more than brevity? As it turns out, in 2022, it’s been the best social barometer I’ve come across.
The Federal Government knew this, or, at least now knows, because we see, almost on the hour, a slickly produced, highly organized tweet stream from the official accounts of the President, Vice President, CDC, and other governmental entities. This pro-government, pro-administration propaganda is encapsulated in colorful charts and slickly produced videos, that look like outtakes from The West Wing TV show, with dreamy, slow-mo effects, dissolves, and hi-tech editing worthy of a Hollywood movie. This is professional propaganda. You really don’t have to scroll far to find out what I’m talking about.
Mercifully, we have come a LONG way from the intellectual assault of Donald Trump’s 3 A.M Twitter barrages, tossed word salad, typed all in caps, with new mystery words that have to be deciphered for common meaning. A good thing right? Not necessarily.
We are standing in the middle of rising COVID floodwaters with the rapidly accelerating BA.2 variant, and we need, now more than ever, to stop treating a pandemic that has killed nearly a million people in the US alone, like mild flu or cold.
This is why I remain completely astounded that a “side story” on NBC News escaped the notice of most of the public and major media. The implications are profound. Basically, in a completely cynical and shallow political move, the Democrats hired a polling firm called Impact Research for THEIR opinion on how Candidates should respond to the ongoing COVID crisis.
Their unequivocal opinion was to “Declare the crisis over and push for acting and feeling more normal”. Think about the implications here. Impact research is saying to the Democrats that to win votes, you need to DUPE voters and simply pretend COVID away. It was Biden himself, in campaign mode of course, who explicitly opined that: “Anyone who's responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States of America." Barely a year later, with an equal or greater number of deaths, his administration is abandoning science for feelings and perceptions.
That would be alarming enough, but now there is a major breach in trust, due to the fact that compliant corporate media are broadcasting the “New Normal” via the dubious opinions of highly paid “experts” like Dr. Leanna Wen, with a tribute to Bobby McFerrin, saying “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”. This isn’t sound medical advice, as much as it is an advertisement for money being prioritized over public health. It’s stupid, selfish, and dangerous, especially to the immunocompromised, and children who remain unvaccinated, with no agency to make sound health choices for themselves. They are being sacrificed daily, being forced to return classrooms with un-filtrated air and zero mask requirements.
Of course, barely whispered about as an aspect of COVID, barely in the public consciousness, is Long Covid, a disease caused by a disease. The debilitating and little understood persistence of horrible symptoms include attacks on major organs, brain fog, fatigue, and strange electrical jolts to extremities, among others, that make life a literal living Hell. Is it even possible to just ignore patients who return to the doctor again and again and are told to just ride out the symptoms? There is no long-term planning for the next wave, so how could there possibly be contingencies for Long Covid? We live in a land of perceptions and feelings in the face of death and suffering. It’s all normalized.
Worse, vaccine protections for the under, and uninsured, will all but disappear. The government, in a bipartisan, collective fit of stupidity, and lack of foresight and empathy, decided that they would cut off funding for everything from testing and tracing, to free vaccines. Remember, they had to be SHAMED into providing free tests after the Presidents press secretary implied it was a completely unaffordable and unrealistic goal.
It’s obvious that a vaccine-only approach has failed, and according to experts I follow on #MedicalTwitter and in articles, the boosters’ efficacy in stopping or preventing severe illness and hospitalization is waning rapidly. None of the vaccines, as I understand it, was specifically designed to stop the variants, to begin with. Breakthrough cases are the rule, not the exception. An accredited expert, Dr, Michael Osterholm said before COVID had ever reached our shores, that it would be a race between how quickly a vaccine could be developed BEFORE the virus mutated. At this point, we’re quite a few letters down the Greek alphabet. These new variants, again as I understand it, are as far removed from the Alpha COVID strain as America is geographically removed from the Far East.
The government can’t have it both ways. They want, as they often refer to humans, healthy “workers”, but refuse to make a reasonable effort to prevent serious illness and death. It’s quite an insane approach. The CDC, for example, which is now completely politicized, suddenly changed the metrics for what constitutes rapid spread, There are numerous instances on Twitter of people (which may be an emerging trend) of people catching COVID, calling in sick, and having their bosses warn, or fire them, insisting they tough it out and work through it. This, of course, causes further spread.
It’s a devastating critique of priorities, that in the mass rush to “Stand With Ukraine” a large portion of people in the US, and their government, can’t even “stand” with them as they are assaulted with COVID.