COVID Weirdness – Endgame

When you get older, one of the things that happens is you end up being more of what you were when you were younger.  For some, like Joe Biden, that package includes underlying small-minded nastiness, condescension, and endless accusations of the racist motives of others as his mental deterioration unmasks what he successfully hid for decades of public life.  For me, it includes heightened skepticism, which is where we are going today.

Topic for today are reactions to the continuing gift to the world from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that is COVID-19.  My complaints are all aimed at what government entities are demanding we do in response to it.  These include, but are not limited to the following:

• Vaccines
• Testing
• Children
• Masking

To put this in perspective, I get vaccines on a couple levels.  I respect them.  The first I remember was for polio, which seemed to show up out of thin air and put young people into braces and iron lungs.  When the vaccines showed up, all our parents made sure we ate the sugar cube.  With COVID, when the time came to get one, we took the jab.  But this choice was not without trepidation, some level of concern.  We knew we were taking a risk and weighed the costs and benefits for all of us.

The problem with mandating vaccinations for every single American is that there is an appreciable population of Americans who had the virus and recovered from it.  They do not need the vaccination as they have much stronger protection than a shot would provide.  Indeed, a vaccination after recovery from the virus ends up being dangerous.  There is also a significant portion of the US population (children) who neither get nor transmit the virus.  The existence of these populations is completely ignored. 

The growing call to segregate from our Fellow Americans who choose not to get vaccinated is troubling, as for the most part, we’ve done pretty good.  People over 50, especially those with any sort of co-morbidity, have for the most part made the decision to take care of themselves.  An analysis of those who are not getting the shot(s) finds more minorities refusing.  So, a call to segregate from those who choose otherwise is once again, structural racism aimed precisely at minorities.  I thought that was a Bad Thing these days.  Apparently not anymore.

The crux of the discussion is antibodies.  Vaccinations introduce antibodies into your bloodstream that fight the virus.  But so do antibodies following an infection and recovery.  Worst (or better), for some reason, children younger than age 18 or so do not get the virus.  Why do they need an inoculation for a virus that seems to target the elderly and overweight?  Better still, why do they need testing and masking?

My perspective that requiring both shots and masks for children who are not susceptible to the virus or requiring them to mask up are little more than government sanctioned child abuse that should be rejected outright.

Testing continues to be a sore point.  On one hand, why are we still testing now that we have both vaccination and therapeutics?  On the other, why are we still using the PCR test which oversamples exposure and throws false positives?  If the object of the exercise is to make sure that those tested are no longer able to either get the virus or transmit it, why are we still testing for its presence rather than testing for antibodies which will give you the real answer?  

My guess is that it is simply another One Size Fits All solution out of the CDC which has been wrong about every single recommendation for the last 16 months and is today simply echoing the Biden party line on what to do next.

The worst part of all this is the wanton suppression of all public discussion on these issues.  It has gotten to the point where the Biden White House is demanding social media platforms actively censor online posts that disagree with the official White House position on vaccines, testing, masking and children.  Their excuse is that any information to the contrary is actively killing people. 

And if they get away with this use of ostensibly private companies for government purposes (which proves Trump’s case in his class-action lawsuit against Twitter and other social media platforms), there will always be another excuse to censor discussion and information.

It is bad enough that the social media platforms have been actively censoring information on therapeutics (hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, for instance) for over a year.  Now the Biden White House wants to get involved in active Big Tech censorship.

Today, we are being told to do things to mitigate COVID-19 infections by people who are simply untrustworthy – the government, the media, social media, and public health officials.  Worse, we are simply not allowed to question what we are being told to do in any meaningful way.  Is it any wonder those pronouncements from upon high are simply being ignored?

I think we are at a point in the current festivities where we are going to have to learn how to live with COVID not unlike how we learned to live with the common cold and the flu.  We didn’t need lockdowns, testing, social distancing, masking or forced vaccinations to beat those.  And we don’t need them to beat this as long as we don’t forget who is at risk and who isn’t. 

Alex Gimarc lives in Anchorage since retiring from the military in 1997. His interests include science and technology, environment, energy, economics, military affairs, fishing and disabilities policies. His weekly column “Interesting Items” is a summary of news stories with substantive Alaska-themed topics. He was a small business owner and Information Technology professional.