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A. N. Owen's avatar

I am still trying to sift through the legacy of COVID. The real legacy isn't the virus itself but the reaction to it, which has exposed enormous fault lines in just about everything in our societies in the modern west. What stands out as perhaps most troubling is the clear, quasi totalitarian diktat on what could or could not be discussed.

The origin of the virus - for all of 2020 anyone suggesting that it could have escaped from a lab rather than naturally occurring was immediately branded a crackpot, and not just a crackpot, but a dangerous and ignorant racist too. A common-sense interpretation of the events of early 2020 clearly pointed towards a lab escape as a major and realistic origin for COVID-19, which is backed up by the Chinese government's behaviors and actions in Wuhan at the time. Common sense isn't always right, but both the establishment governments worldwide and the "scientific community" immediately shut down any discussions on a lab escape despite enormous conflict of interests, and even outright lied about it, as Nicholas Wade, former science writer for the NYT, so brilliantly exposed in his long article on COVID on Medium: https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038. Now we know there's a staggering conflict of interest among many scientists going right up to Fauci himself. Why are they still being excused and why aren't the mainstream media asking them awkward questions about their roles in allowing the virus to emerge in the first place?

Then we have the actual virus itself. Why are we still wearing masks outside? Not a single covid transmission has been traced back to an outdoor transmission between two people. Not one. We've known since pretty early on that COVID transmits through prolonged exposure in closed spaces. In short, you don't get COVID from walking past someone on the sidewalk. That's the scientific fact for you. But we've created a world where solitary schoolchildren (who are the least affected by COVID) wear masks while walking alone through an empty neighborhood. We've created a world where diners can dine in small tables but their waiters have to wear masks. Where's the logic in this?

Then we have the hypocrisies in calling out all references to Covid as the Wuhan or Chinese flu as racist and bigoted, yet the same people have no problems referring to the UK variant or South African variant or Indian variant....

The list goes on. The real problem is that we live in an age of experts, and COVID was created and allowed to escape by the experts, and it was covered up by the experts, and yet we have people still divided between those who shout to everyone we must listen to the experts and do what they tell us and who get incensed when someone simply asks how we know the experts are right (especially as time goes on, it's increasingly clear they are not), versus those who actually dare say, wait, hold on, there's a lot of problems with this policy or that policy, this doesn't make sense, why aren't we allowed to ask what happened in Wuhan and so forth.

Sometimes I wonder if we're starting to witness the beginning of the collapse of the expert class as a moral and political force. This certainly extends to all facets of modern America, in politics, media, culture for a variety of reasons. Contrary to what some people would like, this isn't necessarily a good thing. But the experts also may have brought it upon themselves in their blindness and arrogance of their assumptions.

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HudsonJ's avatar

I feel like everything with Covid had to be dumbed down for general consumption.

Last summer I got into an argument when I thought people should be able to go to beaches. Based on everything I read, beaches were not risky. What would be risky would be people from multiple households driving to the beach, or getting together indoors after the beach. However, why demonize being at the beach. I was almost universally chastised with "why take the chance?" or "you are risking the life of [insert at-risk relative]".

There was no allowance for nuanced thinking or analyzing specific activities done a specific way. It was either a blanket "this is ok" or "this is not OK"

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