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Notes -
It was oversold, it was also worse than the people complaining about it being oversold think it was.
"It also was looking more like a wolf than you think it was" is not very useful when you cried wolf for 2 years. That account is overdrawn so deeply that it doesn't matter anymore how much was in it initially.
Public health officials and the government keeping things gong too long is not the problem here, the problem is that lockdown skeptics have become COVID deniers. Yes shit was bad initially. Yes it was a near thing for quiet problems. No it was not just another flu. Etc. etc.
Saying that the lockdowns were a messaging and public health fuck up is totally fine, but from having these arguments in the past a lot of people are going too far.
Just because the vaccine doesn't make sense for healthy 18 year olds doesn't mean it's not a good idea, but you'd never get that from how people in these space over reacted.
I think the problem is exactly the officials that lied, cheated, stole, oppressed and brutalized the public for several years, with zero consequences, zero accountability and not even as much as mealy-mouthed apology. They keep claiming they did everything right, and the public was the ones too stupid to understand why it's all for their own good. I completely and totally understand people not believing a word that comes out of the mouths of anybody who is in any way connected to this establishment ever again. They didn't just use up their credibility, they piled it up, made a huge bonfire, and when that burned, they borrowed some, and set it on fire too. Their credibility is essentially in the same position as US Treasury now - trillions in debt and keeping digging down without any possible hope of ever reversing not even the value, not even the first, but all the higher level derivatives - they are all trending down. It's the exponential credibility collapse and still, you claim some rural dude that is now hesitant to get the 13th booster is the main problem that should be addressed. Nope, he is not. The fuckers who led us to this point are, and they are still largely in charge.
You have to separate these two things. COVID is a big deal. Public health officials are retarded. These can both be true at the same time.
Yes you are mad about rights abuses and everything else, and so am I. But COVID was still a big deal.
Maybe it is "big deal", maybe not. That can be debated. But certainly the guys who lied to us for years lost the right to be a source in the decision how exactly big. Their informational quality is negative now.
And sure, "public health officials" bear the majority of the blame. But I don't remember a mass movement of rank-and-file to protest the abuses either. I do remember a lot of "racism is a national health issue" but not a lot of "lying, fraud and tyranny is a national health issue". I'm not saying there weren't dissidents - there were - but most of the lower levels enthusiastically enforced whatever they were told to enforce and pushed whatever they were told to push. So, it's not just some lone officials on top that need to account for that.
I don't dispute the abuses. That is not the point, people need to disentangle the abuses and the reality of the disease. Just because the boy cried wolf does not mean that the wolf didn't gnaw off your leg, and that the next one isn't sitting there slavering.
It's way beyond "the abuses". It's a complete paradigmatic collapse. The paradigm that there exist some institutions that are ultimately designed to work for our benefit, and while specific people are fallible and corruptible, in general this system is built for the benefit of the people, is controllable by the people and has people's best interests at heart - is dead. The new paradigm is that this system is a self-interested parasite, which will consume any resource the people allow it to, but will act in ways that do not have much to do with the benefit of the people and is absolutely not controllable and absolutely opaque and violently resistant to any attempt to control it. That's how "people" would - and should - view it now. So if you want to deliver some message that people "need" to do this and that, then this message can not be delivered within the framework of the new paradigm and not be received with as much trust as a message from Nigerian prince telling you that you "need" to send him some money to come into your inheritance rights.
Maybe the wolf is there, maybe it's not. I am certainly not qualified to judge that question. What I know though that this boy - and his family, who conveniently made billions on mandatory wolf awareness trainings - is not going to be the input for my decisions on these question. If anything, I'd probably lean towards doing the opposite of what he's crying about.
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Lived experience comes to the fore here though -- roughly everyone has by now experienced covid for themselves, and for many people it was in fact just another flu. (not even a particularly bad one, for me & mine)
When you are confronted by an environment where it's become clear that doctors, governments, and media have been lying to you more or less constantly for the past few years, lived experience is perhaps the only thing that you truly can know about covid -- and if you yourself shrugged covid off in a couple of days, the logical conclusion seems to be 'this was NBD'. Which if one thinks about it too much can lead to some unpleasant & uncharitable conclusions as to why the aforementioned liars made such a big deal about it.
It's reactive contrarianism at its core. If they were lying about this (masks don't work at the beginning but are important later, or whatever) then the whole thing must be a lie. No.
Original recipe COVID killed a lot of people and fucked up plenty of young and healthy types, but people get hit with COVID remix years later after multiple vaccines and think "oh this must be the only way it be." There's also a lack of understanding of the role of flu vaccines in keeping old people from croaking every year which impairs intuitive comparisons.
The no big deal attitude also requires a lot of conspiratorial thinking that I don't think people realize they are doing. I remember when we pulled outpatient physicians with no critical background to staff ICUs. I remember when we bagged patients by hand. I remember people dying of a heart attack in the ED waiting room because triage was busted. We had pictures of full units, portable morgues. I watched colleagues die due to lack of PPE.
People blow this off.
Everyone just chooses to forget these things when they look back because most people were just locked in their homes on semi-vacation while older family members occasionally died.
It was a disaster. The public health aspect of it was also a disaster, and from the beginning I was screaming at everyone who would listen that this would be the biggest reason why - you'd get basically holocaust revisionism, and everyone would blow off the next one.
You seem sincere, but to give the devil his due -- why should I believe you? My covid experience was 'wake up feeling like shit, find that the horses are out, drag myself through fixing the fence for a couple hours then go back to bed -- sore throat but more or less fine the next day, 100% better by start of day 4'. I do know people that had it somewhat worse than this, but nobody died or came close to it. (for reference, like most of my friends I am solidly middle aged, and my previous-gen relatives are early boomers if not older)
Naively, it seems surprising that nearly everyone I know had this deadly disease, and many of them barely noticed it, and nobody even went to the hospital. If medical authorities hadn't lied about everything else, I might assume that their figures are accurate -- but that is not the world we live in.
I am far from alone in this situation -- I fully realize the conspiratorial thinking required here, but if I accept only evidence that I'm 100% sure of veracity-wise, that is what I am left with.
Yeah your circumstances aren't conducive, but for me with older but still living relatives.....it cut through a lot of em (and that's independent of healthcare involvement.
It's moon landing grade conspiracy theory work. Death rates, mortality figures and so on are stupidly hard to fake.
Ya know what lets use an example. COVID skepticism like the gay communities relationship with AIDs, especially these days. Did it kill a fuckton of people in the past. Yep. Does it seem like that to young gay people now? Nope. The meds are great. They don't take it seriously. As a result all kinds of STDs are going around like crazy and you end up being the one person whose organs won't let you take meds and it's death and everyone forgets about you.
But for most AIDs isn't real anymore.
What do you mean? I'm mid genX, my peers are spread from around 40-60 and my (still living) parents and aunties and uncles and shit are like 75-85. I've got one grandpa still trucking in his late 90s. You are not talking to some zoomer here.
If covid is not a serious threat to my middle-aged (charitably; some of us are passing our prime) peers nor my Boomer+ relatives, who's circumstances exactly would be conducive?
I'm not saying that I quite believe this to be the case, but if again if I trust only what I can directly observe (which is becoming both more sensible and more common these days) -- that is what I'm left with.
Huh.
Do you live somewhere very rural or like Florida or something? (can decline to answer b/c opsec).
I'm kind of shocked you haven't run into more.
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OK, I can grant that, but the people making decisions and the decisions made were the worst parts, far worse than the actual virus.
In many cases I believe the use of drugs like remdesevir and techniques such as ventilation caused deaths in people that would have survived the virus. I know my greatest fear was not that my dad would die from COVID, but that he would go to the hospital and die from treatment, all while I wouldn't be able to see him.
You're underselling how bad the medical profession acted.
The medical professions did great, public health borked it and medical professionals decided to agree with them.
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