The CDC updated its guidance on masks recently: wear two! This literal doubling down on the mask nonsense should be seen as an implicit admission that a single mask doesn’t work. Instead of listening to the new decree, we should take the opportunity to rid ourselves of the medieval belief that the cloth we wear inside stores is preventing COVID at all, and ditch the masks entirely. Other than the health and psychological harm that masks can cause, the greatest danger appears to be the false sense of security that everyone who is at risk of COVID complications may feel when wearing a mask. People with high-risk of death or hospitalization are going out in public thinking that the mask is protecting them. It is not. But the media won’t report it, putting the lives of the vulnerable at risk. Does the media even report who in fact is at risk of COVID-19? We never hear. We only hear that it is somehow dangerous to us all, rather than the very old or very ill.
And now we have President Weekend at Bernie’s telling us that he wants to fight a war against the virus. The old “shock and awe” of the War on Terror years. The collateral damage will far outstrip the damage done by the virus, just as the collateral damage from the foreign interventions over the past 20 years far outstripped the damage done by terrorists. We even hear the same language recycled: “If you’re not with us, you’re with the virus.” Just another echo in the asylum that we found ourselves in over the past year. A governing body refusing to admit that they were wrong, and instead continuing the destructive policy in order to save face. Biden will search for the viral version of the fabled WMDs his entire four years, just as Bush searched for Saddam’s during his.
We are stuck wandering a nightmarish mirror maze; what seems real isn’t, faces and objects distort and transform as we frantically search for an exit. And the only way out is to simply put COVID-19 behind us. Defund PCR testing, strip health departments of their quarantine power, remove emergency powers from mayors and city councils, and allow COVID to spread among the non-vulnerable.
Is this really a pandemic? Why don’t we consider flu, or a cold, or every case of the sniffles, a pandemic? People get sick, there’s no stopping it.
It is important for us to come into contact with pathogens. Demanding that everyone else is responsible for the health of others, and that “zeroCOVID” is somehow a goal that should be attempted, is a recipe for social collapse. Mass poverty, economic ruination, and a complete regression to authoritarianism will be the only result of the path we’ve been on.
