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"When they were shouting about killing grandma or plague rats, I had understood those utterances as words that containing meaning or argument."
I think that, fundamentally, most people just wanted Covid to go away and to return to normality as fast as possible. The governments, after feeling the initial high of the all-in-the-same-boat feeling of Spring 2020 and the relatively normal (in most parts of the West, if memory servers) summer 2020, got worried that they were in for a long slog after Covid "returned" in autumn/winter 2020/2021 and then got fixated on the idea that there is One Weird Trick they can do to make it go away. And there sure was a good candidate for One Weird Trick: the vaccines.
I think this really explains the rest. The Western governments really, truly weren't, as some conspiracy theorists claimed, trying to use the pandemic to re-engineer the society; more than anything, they just wanted the pandemic to go away and to return to "life as it was". At the same time, they felt they couldn't just do nothing, or many people might die and they'd get blamed for it (many people did die, but since they were at least trying to do something, that at least blunted the criticism.)
If one remembers initial promises about the vaccines, they were actually quite modest, in line to what we now know the vaccine does (ie. not that much). However, at some point the hype cycle got out of control and the governments and everyone else started believing that the One Weird Trick really was here, just vaccinate everyone and Covid is over and no large lockdowns are needed. (This was preceeded by a similar but smaller hype cycle around masks being the One Weird Trick, which was sufficient to make masking a thing that still continues among the hardcore Covidians).
The furious hatred against "grandma-killers" and "plague rats" was, then, really a feeling that it was those people, the anti-vaxxers and Covid-skeptics, who were responsible for the One Weird Trick not working. Politicians, media, ordinary citizens - what they felt was that the vaccines would really work as promised if everyone just was responsible and got the vaccine. And it was of course easier for public opinionmakers to blame a small, already-hated group (antivaxxers were a popular target for disdain even before Covid) than to admit that there really was no One Weird Trick.
Even after the initial vaccine hype cycle, there was another one over the Covid vaccine passports, but even here the tone was already different. The vaccine passports were presented as a way to run down measures for most of the population - only leaving the hated ones to suffer from the measures. Of course this was a doomed and idiotic attempt from the get-go, but it probably served for some to get them to the mindset where they could just start to let go of the measures and the fear. Perhaps this was the real purpose.
Thus, it also followed that once it became really clear the vaccine really wasn't what the hype cycle promised, everything just died down. It turned out that the way to make "Covid go away" was simply to run the measures down and stop worrying about Covid. At least here, this was aided greatly by Russia starting the Ukraine War and this, then, becoming the huge global thing to worry about. And once this happened people just mostly also actively started to forgot just how crazy the preceeding years were, precisely because they wanted to forget it all.
This is lazy and ahistorical apologia for criminal malfeasance on a global scale.
The medical industry literally produced a virus, let it out into the populace, killed millions, and then got governments to pay them billions and mandate that people buy their products, and continue getting regular injections for all time!
But yes, everyone was well intentioned and kind, it was a bit of a rough time, we all had a reaction, blah blah blah.
Trump proved polling, politics and media was bullshit. Covid proved the medical industry is heinous bullshit. And the po-faced attempts at reasonability now, three years too late, is pathetic.
It's my honest appraisal of the situation and the motivations among the politicians and other media types, based on a close monitoring of the situation and numerous conversations I've had with such people.
But... that hasn't happened? How many people have gotten a Covid injection for the last year or so? Or in the future?
Yes, the attempt failed.
The mandate still hasn't been rescinded (for three more days), it's just been gutted by the courts for being wildly unconstitutional, and everyone is ignoring it and pretending it doesn't exist. Including you!
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I think government leaders largely deferred to public health authorities, and those public health authorities saw this as the opportunity of their lifetime to Do Good and Make A Difference. Bureaucrats being bureaucrats, they weren't keen to acknowledge any shortcomings or limits to their knowledge, and put their hands in all the pies they could fit in. Many of those bureaucrats had a very ideological take on what Doing Good looks like. My state banned fishing and then later on one of its counties promoted having sex through a hole in a shower curtain.
They also never put any safeguards against abuse in place. Not just on health departments but no level of government put in any explicit limits on what could be done, or requiring legislative approval, or even gave an explicit deadline of under what conditions the government would declare it over. It was a blank check, heck a credit card with no limits that only expired when those who had been given the card declared they no longer needed it.
And to me, I see some elements of what red-pillers call a shit-test; one we clearly failed as a society. Most people just meekly accepted whatever the government decided whether or not it made sense. In fact, the people were more upset at the pushback than anything else. And while I don’t think the government did all of this with future applications in mind, I think the government has basically learned that it can actually get away with quite a lot if it provided that the people are frightened enough.
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Link please
Fishing ban: https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/mar/25/statewide-fishing-ban-ordered-by-washington-wildli/
It lasted until May 5. No accommodation for people who obtain significant amounts of food from catching their own.
Shower curtains for sex: https://lynnwoodtimes.com/2020/12/07/covexxx-19-has-king-county-public-health-gone-too-far/
Y'know, I wonder how COVID affected the "glory hole" tag on various sites...
Surely you know about how Canada's CDC actually recommended gloryholes for pandemic-safe sex, which is the most ridiculous and short-sighted wannabe bandwagon jumping thing I've ever seen:
https://www.complex.com/life/2020/07/canadian-health-officials-suggest-glory-holes-for-sex-during-covid19
That was just BC AFAIK -- the previously unexplored correlation of glory hole fans with government functionaries in Greater Cascadia is... noteworthy I guess.
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I think that a large part of public health authority decisionmaking was simply trying to take burden off their workers, who often were particularly horribly overburdened at the start of the crisis but without matching bonuses or pay increases (since the future of the budgets of those institutions had also, for obvious reasons, gone completely up in the air). Basically the only way to placate the workers they had at this point was lobbying for restrictions in hopes that it would somehow reduce this burden of work. However, increasingly as the crisis went on, this was also countered and balanced by businesses lobbying for reopening (including vaccine passports as a partial mean of reopening).
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While I think the second part is surely correct -- ass-covering is an age-old political first-responder -- I'm not sure that many governments were anxious for life to return to "as it was." It need not be conspiratorial, but as the underlying theme of progressivism is that 'everything is terrible until we achieve utopia,' there was a lot of incentive for blue governors, urban mayors and unions to try to leverage the crisis as an opportunity for systemic change to some pretty fundamental aspects of life, like remote work and schooling, the operation of elections, etc. That these things have mostly returned to normal was, in my understanding, not without resistance and only because of normie insistence on "as it was."
Globally speaking there was, in the end, fairly little difference between right-wing and left-wing politicians in the harshness of Covid measures - or, rather, there were both right-wingers and left-wingers going with heavy, proactive measures approach (say, Orban and Ardern) or anything from light to non-existent measures (AMLO in Mexico, Bolsonaro in Brazil). It's not something one can strictly blame on progressivism, and the crisis certainly was also used for all sorts of agendas by all sorts of parties.
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Strong disagree, as outlined in this post.
Underlined. I was wrong on this one. They didn't study "transmission", because stopping transmission would be unnecessary if the vaccine stopped infection.
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I think Stefferi is right if he is talking about expectations for the vaccine before the first trial results were released. Especially focusing on scientific expectations, not the partisan "If Trump release a vaccine before the election it'll be rat poison".
Sure, fair enough. That was the consensus among immunologists I was chatting as early as March of 2020, from my recollection of in person conversations, that if we want something quick, that's feasible, but that it isn't likely to work all that well and that the tradeoffs on safety for rushing are probably not great. All in all, I don't think Covid or the vaccines really brought anything that was very scientifically surprising, but publicly broadcast narratives were far enough from actual science that people kept being surprised.
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Yes, I'm talking about the very first chatter there was on the vaccine, ie. some months after March 2020. I didn't quite get /u/WalterOdim's point about FDA, and by Dec 2020 the hype cycle was already running hard.
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