Let’s compare two paradigms of What Is Happening:

What we’ll call the Standard Paradigm (SP) goes more or less like this: An unprecedented if long-anticipated viral threat emerged in China. Our institutional bureaucrats, scientists and the media looked at the data and decided that lockdowns and mass vaccinations were the best way forward for humanity. At all points we Followed the Science. Our response was conditioned – perhaps even required – by the pandemic itself, that is to say, by reality, and all harms arising from our response are similarly laid at the feet of a novel pathogen. To the extent our response failed, it’s be didn’t Follow the Science hard enough. While the pandemic measures may have hurt some people, they were necessary to save lives.

Dissident theories are not as unified, but the most current and heavily memed version, according to the Great Reset Paradigm (GRP), holds that the virus is a mere pretext. Either it does not exist at all, or was released intentionally to justify mass containment or mass vaccination, or both. Events have been carefully steered by shadowy globalist elites via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, or others. The purpose is either to depopulate the world, impoverish the West, introduce a social credit system, or some combination of these or other things. The GRP regards the pandemic measures as profoundly antidemocratic, characteristic of the powerful autocratic cartel responsible for them.

Who’s right, and where? Who’s wrong, and why?