Enough Already
Atlanta, GA
September 14, 2020
Maybe resistance is finally starting to build.
Tom Woods relayed a few comments over the weekend, including these from physician, academic, and stem cell biologist Dr. Victoria Fox:
“I’m sorry, it’s time for public health officials to implement evidence-based pandemic mitigation solutions that are logistically feasible, sustainable and target the problem while allowing society to function. Give people viable solutions they can implement day to day to protect their loved ones during outbreaks. You can’t tell the world to stay home and ‘socially distance’ – whatever that even means – and then act shocked, and punish society because your vague, untested voodoo didn’t work. Because the truth is there is no good solution to this – only tradeoffs. ‘Public health’ doesn’t want to be responsible for the adverse outcomes of the tradeoffs so they have developed a strategy that [claims] the pandemic [is] preventable and places blame on society for not complying.”
Perfectly said. Woods continues:
“Instead of being mature adults who understand that widespread shutdowns leave massive wreckage in their wake (they’re so devastating that I can’t believe any compassionate human being could support them), we’re instead told to ignore the wreckage, make the whole thing into a simple morality play, and then lecture people for not complying when the virus doesn’t simply go away.
“We can show charts of states and countries that implemented house arrest or mask mandates and those that didn’t, with the names removed. You will not be able to tell which ones locked down or mandated masks, how hard they did so, how intense their so-called mitigation strategies were, or when or how widely they reopened. The data is totally random. That’s just a fact.
“Yet, just like Keynesian fiscal stimulus, when the approach doesn’t work, our superiors respond with an even heavier dose of the original poison. So when Obama, Bush, or Trump spending yielded terrible results, the response from its evidence-impervious architects was not that the whole approach might be juvenile and destructive, but (of course) that they hadn’t done enough of it.
“Same with the lockdowns. And, no surprise, it’s generally the same people advocating them. Had Florida locked down to cope with the summer “Sun Belt spike” and gotten the results below, this chart would have been presented as scientific proof lockdowns prevented overwhelmed hospitals. But this happened without lockdowns, so we just stop talking about Florida.”
Then came predictable “news” on events in the free state of South Dakota.
“We no doubt recall (because it was in the media for days) a paper published by an ‘Institute for Labor Economics’ claiming that the Sturgis motorcycle rally was responsible for over 266,000 new COVID ‘cases’.
“The authors’ contempt for the people they treat in that paper is evident throughout, starting from the very beginning. The paper opens with a quotation from the singer in a band that performed there, saying enough is enough, and that it’s good to see people living like human beings again.
“There have been plenty of responses to that paper that cut it off at the knees, but now even Slate – which isn’t exactly eager to exonerate mostly pro-Trump motorcycle dudes – ran an article called ‘The Sturgis Biker Rally Did Not Cause 266,796 Cases of COVID-19’. It concludes:
“Exaggerated headlines and cherry-picking of results for ‘I told you so’ media moments can dangerously undermine the long-term integrity of the science – something we can little afford right now.”
If only our government and cultural arbiters were swayed by concerns about affordability.
We should not feel OK being compelled to live as we have this year, and should never accept it again. The virus may be nasty, but there have been others, and there will be more. And none require a nanny state to tell us to take reasonable precaution as they rise, spread, and dissipate, as viruses do.
But the calamitous government response produced an unmitigated disaster of predictably unprecedented proportion. We just commemorated the anniversary of 9/11, and are astounded that Bill DeBlasio and Andrew Cuomo have done more long-term damage to New York than Mohammed Atta did.
The public “servants” and health officials who inflicted this catastrophe should be held personally liable. And none of the “mitigating” actions of the last seven months should be normalized. Masks and separation should not be part of civilized social engagement.
It’s not as if I have no elderly relatives. The fact that I do only butresses my argument. My wife’s father is in a nursing home. We’ve not been allowed there since March. For reasons unrelated to COVID, he has been in and out of the hospital the last several months. He is there again now. But he has been unable to see his daughter, or his grandsons, despite the obvious benefit they’d have to his health. They are his only family, yet he is somehow supposed to recover, or die, without them. This is sadistic.
What in God’s name has happened to us? We have allowed COVID to convince us that no other ailment matters, and that a lack of human connection is tolerable even (or especially) for the susceptible elderly.
Yes, seniors are vulnerable (duh). But they know that. Still, many, if not most, had hoped to spend their remaining years with their kids, grandkids, and friends. Yet some elected official or government bureaucrat presumes to decide for them that they can’t. Who do they think they are?
It is time to admit mistakes, remove the ridiculous mandates, and lift the inhuman restrictions. Free people should assess our own risk, make our own decisions, and live our own lives. After all, we only have one.
Enough already. It is time to reclaim our dignity, and restore our humanity. Perhaps the worst aspect of this episode, and our age, is that this common sense admonition is such a tough sell.
JD
