The fact that the George Floyd/BLM riots and looting were ok and encouraged from a public health perspective during a “pandemic” but anything Trump did was a superspreader event. In general, nothing made sense.
I've said this before, but part of my philosophical rule-of-thumb is that I immediately become skeptical of a narrative that I'm not allowed to question. Truth does not fear investigation. Asking legitimate questions about lockdowns in general was not met with a good faith effort to discover the truth. It was met with harassment, censorship, doxxing, intimidation, etc. etc. This has gone to apply to everything about the official narrative.
Easy: The U.S. government essentially saying, "We've quickly created mRNA vaccines that have never been tried before to defeat one of the coronaviruses, which are notoriously impossible to vaccinate against. And oh yeah, by the way, we have no idea whatsoever what the long-term effects might be. Is that a problem?"
As soon as I heard they planned to shut down the economy for 2 weeks, which was very very early on in my country, I knew the entire thing was a lie. I'm an economist. You don't turn the fucking economy on and off. That's not how it works. It's not about money or the GDP (an idiotic metric). Shutting it down means a lot of people are going to suffer and suffer a lot. They were still counting deaths from 2008 a decade later. We'll be counting them for decades more because idiotic and irresponsible public health officers (the same ones saying only they can weigh in on the vaccine cause it saves lives reee) came into my domain. Drug overdoses, suicides, supply chain issues, poverty, income inequality... All up. The drinking issues and depression will cause deaths that will be hard to even quantify. All because doctors thought they knew how to run an economy.
.1. N95 may reduce exposure. Cloth masks a joke. If aerosolized, nothing will stop it.
2. You can't diagnose/differentiate exposure from infection by pcr.
3. Reduction from 3 tests to 2 with pcr rollout (on US) made results even less accurate. Intuitively suspected 40 cycles way too high
4. Fauci admitted to (ig)noble mask lie.
5. I expected protection of vulnerable, who were known by March. Was shocked at lockdowns.
6. Coronaviruses are notoriously mutagenic, which is why no useful vax against them has ever been produced. Cannot possibly develop, manufacture & distribute faster than it can mutate.
7 Asymptomatic spreaders? Seriously?
On the "pseudo-vaxes":
1. My 1st question on reading description was "how long does the artificial mRNA persist?" Never saw any data, only vague assurances.
2. My 2nd question was "What if the spike causes the disease?" Salk Institute answered thay question in their 4/30/21 press announcement.
Lockdowns didn't really impact me since I'm rural. Masks annoying. Not jabbed & they'll have to kill me 1st.
Hi, first my background is important. I am an engineer and work in software. In the early 90's I worked for pharma building clinical trial systems to collect data for analysis and regulatory submission. I started researching vaccine when i had kids early 2000's. My starting assumption was they were safe and effective. I read all the books at the time and followed up all the references.
I was satisfied enough and was going to proceed with full vaccination schedule when i came across an article about mercury and simpsonwood. I didn't believe the article so I downloaded the transcript of the conference and read the whole thing. I was shocked by what i read and then i did a really deep dive into the system of regulation. As the 2000's progressed the topic of vaccination progressively became more and more contentious as the industry was looking to replace the lost revenue from their dwindling pipeline of drugs. The deterioration of the regulatory bodies and peer reviewed science is actually well documented. I invested hundreds and hundreds of hour researching risks of vaccines and risks of disease in developed world. I went to the local medical stacks to pull paper studies to determine the real risks of some of these diseases prior to mass vaccination. Vaccine sales is a business of fear. Like insurance.
I also watched the attempt of the WHO and pharma to create a similar scare with H1N1 flu in 2009. I read all of the science on that and I also knew how bad flu tracking statistics were.
In late 2019 the first rumours of SARS-COV2 registered on my radar and i was half expecting a repeat of 2019. Needless to say shocked when Italy subsequently went into lockdown and panic ensued without anyone looking at the actual death statistics.
I saw the early death numbers from china and the fact that it was all elderly confirmed what I suspected that it was going to be equivalent in severity to a bad flu season. Of course nothing could be certain but i also knew that all the pandemic protocols said don't close things. Michael Levitt and John Ioannidis, Roger Hodkinson all confirmed what I saw in the data early on.
I also recognized panic when I saw it. I paid very close attention to the UK media which was the only reasonable source of skepticism at the time and a poor one at that.
Once i saw Boris reverse strategies i informed my boss that we better prepare to work remotely and make sure we can turn on a dime because we were going to get locked down. He thought I was crazy. 3 weeks later he thought I was a genius (we are in Canada) because we followed the UK policies by about 3-6 weeks.
I knew from the beginning because i already knew the WHO + pharma tried the same in 2009. I am pretty convinced that the medical officers of health 11 years ago were baby boomers or post war children. People who could remember hardship and people who were trained in medical schools prior to pharma funding and the perversion of evidence based medicine through marketing science. Those medical officers of health barely won the war against panic in 2009. Sadly, they all retired in the interim and have been replaced by a new generation who grew up 100 percent under pharma and extreme risk aversion. Somehow the primal fear of bugs has allowed them to sideline emergency planners -- mostly army trained -- who would never have contemplated a strategy of containment.
They have said as much. In Canada there have been only a small handful of skeptical voices who are real experts, namely former emergency planners, and former medical officers of health. They were all ignored. There were only 2 contemporary doctors who spoke out. dr Byram Bridle and Dr Hodkinson. We owe them a lot.
That is my story of being awake the whole time. My real awakening was when i started researching vaccines after having a child 20 years before.
3. "Ivermectin does not work and must not be used"
Also... for anyone who was inclined to do the research, the "possible" side effects of the mRNA injections was posted, either on the CDC or FDA website, in early 2020. They included ALL of the side effects we now know are true. I assume that page has now been deleted.
1. I was an early mask advocate (Apr/May 2020) then I was made aware (June 2020) of the WHO document containing the meta analysis of the mask rct's for influenza. I started investigating masking in general which led me to dismiss their claims that masks were effective. I also learned a new term for "and then a miracle occurred" => mechanistic plausibility.
2. I started noticing that the lock down severity indices were not correlated with mortality rates.
3. The whole debate surrounding how Sweden was managing their response convinced me that we were not applying a risk-benefit analysis to much - if any - of the PH sanctioned "mitigations".
4. Denial of natural immunity.
For me all of these factors came into focus during mid/late Summer 2020. I learned quite a bit along the way as I am a math/software specialist.
With the caveat that the human mind is great at constructing a coherent story that fits its beliefs and memory, here is my submission. My first indication that something rotten was afoot was the Diamond Princess data. Looking at that experience, and that data, it did not make sense to react the way we did. Now, in full disclosure, it took me months and months to figure out that the COVID Dumpster Fire™ was never about data.
Maybe that was my second clue. I noticed many writers, myself included, providing analysis and data that seemed to run counter to the policy approaches being taken. Yet, this was to no avail! As an engineer, I had (have) an almost religious belief in the power of data. It still shocks me that the data is not as useful as I would have thought (hoped) it would be. As one Twitter poster wryly observed, "Looks like only 6 of us paid attention in stats 101."
My third clue was when the governor of my state--the recently-deposed Emperor Cuomo--invited a selection of, basically, rich guys, many of whom were not disease experts, including Bill Gates, to devise a way to "safely open the state back up." My spidey-sense buzzed with a sharp, "What the absolute...?" Why would McKinsey be the appropriate source for such information? Various, shall we say, questionable recommendations, like bars could be open, but could not play the television, ensued. (No, I am not kidding.) One does not need to be an epidemiologist or virologist or statistician to see that recommendation as barking lunacy.
Around the same time, people I followed on Twitter began to post pictures of the W.H.O. web pages that ostensibly informed appropriate behavior regarding respiratory viruses. For convenience, these recommendations were generally in the form of matrices. These matrices contained information such as, "there is no data showing that masks work" or "there is no data showing that sanitizing surfaces works," yet those approaches were being applied wholesale and often mandated. On that same list of W.H.O. resources, they had a category called "things to never do in response to a respiratory virus outbreak." Several policies from that list were also being instituted! During this timeframe, I enjoyed bouts of raucous laughter interspersed with extreme anger.
The final clue arrived when I attempted to develop a "nomological network of cumulative evidence" about masking. This approach was outlined in a book, written by an evolutionary behavioral scientist, that I had just finished reading. That led me to consult the CDC website, since the most conservative approach is to consult the primary source being cited by the policy people, particularly if you disagree with the policy. To my surprise, the references--most of which I downloaded and read--did not provide legitimate, scientific, RCT-derived, supportive data for the policy recommendations and/or mandates. (They still do not.) I am still struggling with the "stickiness" of masks as an approach that reasonably intelligent people use voluntarily.
It took me months to notice things like hospital reimbursement policy or technical performance data of the mRNA treatments or the (now obvious) vilification of existing treatments and remedies to justify the Emergency Use Authorization for the mRNA treatments. By that point, I realized we were being fed a line of bovine feces, intravenously. We were all riding the Crazy Train, and the conductors were using a map unrelated to reality or science. However, Pfizer was making a boatload of money! The same is true of the people who initially posited that PCR testing was a "gold standard" but that was, again, too nuanced for me to notice initially.
My current state-of-mind is realization that we are in the midst of a shared group psychosis, that has taken on the timbre of a religious experience, on both sides. I have not the faintest clue how or when it ends, but I have given up thinking I have any clue on that point. (Feel free to cite me, should you use this posting, as "The Wiltster" although I am fine with using my actual name, should that be necessary.)
When I heard saw how officials reacted to Trump mentioning hydroxychloroquine, I then tracked down the original chinese study that showed they gave fatal doses to people who were nearly dead already.
And when the press didn't report on the fatal doses being purposefully given to end-stage people, and I saw HCQ had been used safely for decades, I knew it was a sham.
I was a senior in American high school at the time, having been forced out of in-person school for give or take three months. Lucky as I was, my school still held regular classes online with competent instructors, and I could finish up the year's work without much hassle. Most everyone I knew personally took the transition decently well, as did my left-leaning parents, both working from home in guest-bedrooms-turned-offices, as my sister soldiered on with her university course work in - ironically - Public Health. My teachers were decidedly optimistic about the future, having lived through SARS-1, and (albeit heavily gutted) AP exams came and went as pretty much everyone expected them to. The general attitude of myself, and most everyone I knew, was that the feds knew what they were doing, and would lead us out of this mess before Summer. The stretch from 2 weeks to 2 months, then three, was something of mild concern, but nothing to agonize about in the long run. After all, the government knew best.
Three days before my virtual graduation, I watched Minneapolis burn live on YouTube.
I expected outrage, at the idea that these people would so brazenly break the lockdown we* (naive, I know) worked so hard to slow the spread for. At the very least, that major party leaders would come together and condemn if not the nature of mass street protests in a pandemic, then at least the rioting and looting itself. Instead, every major corporate outlet left of Fox News wrote waxing puff-pieces about an open letter, signed by over a thousand 'health professionals', calling for the continuation of these 'protests for racial justice' - despite what I'd been told was the most omnipresent, dangerous threat to my health since the Spanish Flu. Never mind the protestors against Whitmer in Michigan, whose policies even my parents considered excessive, were dismissed as nothing more than evil, science-denying trump supporters and white supremacists, and fosters of a super-spreader event of the highest order. All the while, the destruction and chaos I saw all, straight from the amateur streamers on the ground, was explained away as simply my lying eyes - the protests were 'fiery but mostly peaceful', or so the story went.
What little faith I had left crumbled to pieces in the coming weeks, as more and more riots broke out across America, with official responses ranging from muteness to outright support. Suddenly, the all-encompassing focus on Corona was thrown by the wayside, and as if by an invisible hand, the 'national conversation' had shifted away from a pandemic. You couldn't just ignore a pandemic, picking and choosing which mass gatherings in the street were 'safe', right? But social justice trumped social distance, and pick and choose they did.
It was perhaps at that time I realized that if the media could so brazenly lie about the protests, it followed that they were capable of lying about everything else, too. Yandex (Google being worse than useless) led me to Berenson, and it took a grand total of one day thereafter for the entire masquerade to come crashing down, taking a worldview of 18 long years with it.
I'm 66, and took the Moderna vaccine (2 doses) last Jan/Feb based on the advice of my doctor. I hesitated after listening to several people recommend against it, but in the end I trusted my doctor. (BTW - I've never taken the flu shot - I had no trouble refusing that one!) Wish I'd done the same for the Moderna shot, but what's done is done. It will be a very long time, if ever, before I trust most doctors and the government again. Sad to admit that I was a very naive 66 year old! I have many other reasons and many have already been mentioned - here's my partial list.
1. When "2 weeks to slow-the-spread to prevent hospital overcrowding" was extended.
2. When alternative therapies/solutions were ridiculed and called misinformation. (Ex. Drs. Sabine Gold, Peter McCollough, Pierre Kory and many others).
3. When the government/Fauci and msm didn't mention or encourage Americans to take steps to improve their immune systems by losing weight, and supplementing with zinc, Vit D, etc.).
4. When vaccines were recommended for all ages - yet 99.9+% survive the illness.
5. Illegal immigrants crossing the Texas border are not required to take the shots.
6. When the Indian province (Udder Pradesh??) and Mexico City basically killed Covid after distributing Home Kits (including Ivermectin) to their citizens.
7. Substack subscriptions - eugyppius and el gato malo have been most helpful to me. While much of the content and the comments are way beyond my ability to understand, I have learned so much and am very thankful.
8. Recently in North Texas white Texans have been denied monoclonal antibodies.
9. Two-hour episode with Mike Yeardon on Reiner Fuellmichs' Corona Investigative Committee's Jan. 7th podcast.
I knew by April 2020 that society was going insane. I'm not a genius. I asked obvious questions and saw that nobody in the mainstream was attempting to answer those obvious questions.
1. The medical literature from the previous decades said containment was a sham after a disease of this nature became widespread.
2. They weren't talking about the previous medical literature.
3. They didn't even attempt to provide reasons for disregarding previous norms.
4. They NEVER spoke of waves 2, 3, 4, etc. If lockdown stalls wave 1, why does that stop wave 2? It seemed like an obvious question that nobody cared to address. For months they acted as if COVID was going to be one wave then it's done.
5. COVID went from an modeled ~5% fatality rate to an actual ~0.15% very quickly. Nobody acknowledged it and the central planners changed none of their plans. It was obvious very early we weren't using data to inform our course of action.
One simple thing - there was a complete blocking of physician innovation on early treatment. I've never seen this before. Physicians normally collaborate to treat difficult or unusual illnesses. Never seen them lose licenses or be fired for doing so.
I knew something awful would happen to bring chaos to the 2020 Election so I was just waiting for it. When the media started censoring famous and well-respected doctors right away in February/March 2020, like Risch and Ioannidis, I knew what it was. Nothing ever made sense to me, after the first month.
Stanford scientist John Ioannidis finds himself under attack for questioning the prevailing wisdom about lockdowns. - April 2020
What convinced you containment was a sham?
The fact that the George Floyd/BLM riots and looting were ok and encouraged from a public health perspective during a “pandemic” but anything Trump did was a superspreader event. In general, nothing made sense.
I've said this before, but part of my philosophical rule-of-thumb is that I immediately become skeptical of a narrative that I'm not allowed to question. Truth does not fear investigation. Asking legitimate questions about lockdowns in general was not met with a good faith effort to discover the truth. It was met with harassment, censorship, doxxing, intimidation, etc. etc. This has gone to apply to everything about the official narrative.
Easy: The U.S. government essentially saying, "We've quickly created mRNA vaccines that have never been tried before to defeat one of the coronaviruses, which are notoriously impossible to vaccinate against. And oh yeah, by the way, we have no idea whatsoever what the long-term effects might be. Is that a problem?"
As soon as I heard they planned to shut down the economy for 2 weeks, which was very very early on in my country, I knew the entire thing was a lie. I'm an economist. You don't turn the fucking economy on and off. That's not how it works. It's not about money or the GDP (an idiotic metric). Shutting it down means a lot of people are going to suffer and suffer a lot. They were still counting deaths from 2008 a decade later. We'll be counting them for decades more because idiotic and irresponsible public health officers (the same ones saying only they can weigh in on the vaccine cause it saves lives reee) came into my domain. Drug overdoses, suicides, supply chain issues, poverty, income inequality... All up. The drinking issues and depression will cause deaths that will be hard to even quantify. All because doctors thought they knew how to run an economy.
I'm a retired Med lab tech, so my training:
.1. N95 may reduce exposure. Cloth masks a joke. If aerosolized, nothing will stop it.
2. You can't diagnose/differentiate exposure from infection by pcr.
3. Reduction from 3 tests to 2 with pcr rollout (on US) made results even less accurate. Intuitively suspected 40 cycles way too high
4. Fauci admitted to (ig)noble mask lie.
5. I expected protection of vulnerable, who were known by March. Was shocked at lockdowns.
6. Coronaviruses are notoriously mutagenic, which is why no useful vax against them has ever been produced. Cannot possibly develop, manufacture & distribute faster than it can mutate.
7 Asymptomatic spreaders? Seriously?
On the "pseudo-vaxes":
1. My 1st question on reading description was "how long does the artificial mRNA persist?" Never saw any data, only vague assurances.
2. My 2nd question was "What if the spike causes the disease?" Salk Institute answered thay question in their 4/30/21 press announcement.
Lockdowns didn't really impact me since I'm rural. Masks annoying. Not jabbed & they'll have to kill me 1st.
Hi, first my background is important. I am an engineer and work in software. In the early 90's I worked for pharma building clinical trial systems to collect data for analysis and regulatory submission. I started researching vaccine when i had kids early 2000's. My starting assumption was they were safe and effective. I read all the books at the time and followed up all the references.
I was satisfied enough and was going to proceed with full vaccination schedule when i came across an article about mercury and simpsonwood. I didn't believe the article so I downloaded the transcript of the conference and read the whole thing. I was shocked by what i read and then i did a really deep dive into the system of regulation. As the 2000's progressed the topic of vaccination progressively became more and more contentious as the industry was looking to replace the lost revenue from their dwindling pipeline of drugs. The deterioration of the regulatory bodies and peer reviewed science is actually well documented. I invested hundreds and hundreds of hour researching risks of vaccines and risks of disease in developed world. I went to the local medical stacks to pull paper studies to determine the real risks of some of these diseases prior to mass vaccination. Vaccine sales is a business of fear. Like insurance.
I also watched the attempt of the WHO and pharma to create a similar scare with H1N1 flu in 2009. I read all of the science on that and I also knew how bad flu tracking statistics were.
In late 2019 the first rumours of SARS-COV2 registered on my radar and i was half expecting a repeat of 2019. Needless to say shocked when Italy subsequently went into lockdown and panic ensued without anyone looking at the actual death statistics.
I saw the early death numbers from china and the fact that it was all elderly confirmed what I suspected that it was going to be equivalent in severity to a bad flu season. Of course nothing could be certain but i also knew that all the pandemic protocols said don't close things. Michael Levitt and John Ioannidis, Roger Hodkinson all confirmed what I saw in the data early on.
I also recognized panic when I saw it. I paid very close attention to the UK media which was the only reasonable source of skepticism at the time and a poor one at that.
Once i saw Boris reverse strategies i informed my boss that we better prepare to work remotely and make sure we can turn on a dime because we were going to get locked down. He thought I was crazy. 3 weeks later he thought I was a genius (we are in Canada) because we followed the UK policies by about 3-6 weeks.
I knew from the beginning because i already knew the WHO + pharma tried the same in 2009. I am pretty convinced that the medical officers of health 11 years ago were baby boomers or post war children. People who could remember hardship and people who were trained in medical schools prior to pharma funding and the perversion of evidence based medicine through marketing science. Those medical officers of health barely won the war against panic in 2009. Sadly, they all retired in the interim and have been replaced by a new generation who grew up 100 percent under pharma and extreme risk aversion. Somehow the primal fear of bugs has allowed them to sideline emergency planners -- mostly army trained -- who would never have contemplated a strategy of containment.
They have said as much. In Canada there have been only a small handful of skeptical voices who are real experts, namely former emergency planners, and former medical officers of health. They were all ignored. There were only 2 contemporary doctors who spoke out. dr Byram Bridle and Dr Hodkinson. We owe them a lot.
That is my story of being awake the whole time. My real awakening was when i started researching vaccines after having a child 20 years before.
1. "natural immunity does not work"
2. "HCQ/zinc does not work and must not be used"
3. "Ivermectin does not work and must not be used"
Also... for anyone who was inclined to do the research, the "possible" side effects of the mRNA injections was posted, either on the CDC or FDA website, in early 2020. They included ALL of the side effects we now know are true. I assume that page has now been deleted.
Diamond Princess.
For me it was four factors.
1. I was an early mask advocate (Apr/May 2020) then I was made aware (June 2020) of the WHO document containing the meta analysis of the mask rct's for influenza. I started investigating masking in general which led me to dismiss their claims that masks were effective. I also learned a new term for "and then a miracle occurred" => mechanistic plausibility.
2. I started noticing that the lock down severity indices were not correlated with mortality rates.
3. The whole debate surrounding how Sweden was managing their response convinced me that we were not applying a risk-benefit analysis to much - if any - of the PH sanctioned "mitigations".
4. Denial of natural immunity.
For me all of these factors came into focus during mid/late Summer 2020. I learned quite a bit along the way as I am a math/software specialist.
With the caveat that the human mind is great at constructing a coherent story that fits its beliefs and memory, here is my submission. My first indication that something rotten was afoot was the Diamond Princess data. Looking at that experience, and that data, it did not make sense to react the way we did. Now, in full disclosure, it took me months and months to figure out that the COVID Dumpster Fire™ was never about data.
Maybe that was my second clue. I noticed many writers, myself included, providing analysis and data that seemed to run counter to the policy approaches being taken. Yet, this was to no avail! As an engineer, I had (have) an almost religious belief in the power of data. It still shocks me that the data is not as useful as I would have thought (hoped) it would be. As one Twitter poster wryly observed, "Looks like only 6 of us paid attention in stats 101."
My third clue was when the governor of my state--the recently-deposed Emperor Cuomo--invited a selection of, basically, rich guys, many of whom were not disease experts, including Bill Gates, to devise a way to "safely open the state back up." My spidey-sense buzzed with a sharp, "What the absolute...?" Why would McKinsey be the appropriate source for such information? Various, shall we say, questionable recommendations, like bars could be open, but could not play the television, ensued. (No, I am not kidding.) One does not need to be an epidemiologist or virologist or statistician to see that recommendation as barking lunacy.
Around the same time, people I followed on Twitter began to post pictures of the W.H.O. web pages that ostensibly informed appropriate behavior regarding respiratory viruses. For convenience, these recommendations were generally in the form of matrices. These matrices contained information such as, "there is no data showing that masks work" or "there is no data showing that sanitizing surfaces works," yet those approaches were being applied wholesale and often mandated. On that same list of W.H.O. resources, they had a category called "things to never do in response to a respiratory virus outbreak." Several policies from that list were also being instituted! During this timeframe, I enjoyed bouts of raucous laughter interspersed with extreme anger.
The final clue arrived when I attempted to develop a "nomological network of cumulative evidence" about masking. This approach was outlined in a book, written by an evolutionary behavioral scientist, that I had just finished reading. That led me to consult the CDC website, since the most conservative approach is to consult the primary source being cited by the policy people, particularly if you disagree with the policy. To my surprise, the references--most of which I downloaded and read--did not provide legitimate, scientific, RCT-derived, supportive data for the policy recommendations and/or mandates. (They still do not.) I am still struggling with the "stickiness" of masks as an approach that reasonably intelligent people use voluntarily.
It took me months to notice things like hospital reimbursement policy or technical performance data of the mRNA treatments or the (now obvious) vilification of existing treatments and remedies to justify the Emergency Use Authorization for the mRNA treatments. By that point, I realized we were being fed a line of bovine feces, intravenously. We were all riding the Crazy Train, and the conductors were using a map unrelated to reality or science. However, Pfizer was making a boatload of money! The same is true of the people who initially posited that PCR testing was a "gold standard" but that was, again, too nuanced for me to notice initially.
My current state-of-mind is realization that we are in the midst of a shared group psychosis, that has taken on the timbre of a religious experience, on both sides. I have not the faintest clue how or when it ends, but I have given up thinking I have any clue on that point. (Feel free to cite me, should you use this posting, as "The Wiltster" although I am fine with using my actual name, should that be necessary.)
When I heard saw how officials reacted to Trump mentioning hydroxychloroquine, I then tracked down the original chinese study that showed they gave fatal doses to people who were nearly dead already.
And when the press didn't report on the fatal doses being purposefully given to end-stage people, and I saw HCQ had been used safely for decades, I knew it was a sham.
I was a senior in American high school at the time, having been forced out of in-person school for give or take three months. Lucky as I was, my school still held regular classes online with competent instructors, and I could finish up the year's work without much hassle. Most everyone I knew personally took the transition decently well, as did my left-leaning parents, both working from home in guest-bedrooms-turned-offices, as my sister soldiered on with her university course work in - ironically - Public Health. My teachers were decidedly optimistic about the future, having lived through SARS-1, and (albeit heavily gutted) AP exams came and went as pretty much everyone expected them to. The general attitude of myself, and most everyone I knew, was that the feds knew what they were doing, and would lead us out of this mess before Summer. The stretch from 2 weeks to 2 months, then three, was something of mild concern, but nothing to agonize about in the long run. After all, the government knew best.
Three days before my virtual graduation, I watched Minneapolis burn live on YouTube.
I expected outrage, at the idea that these people would so brazenly break the lockdown we* (naive, I know) worked so hard to slow the spread for. At the very least, that major party leaders would come together and condemn if not the nature of mass street protests in a pandemic, then at least the rioting and looting itself. Instead, every major corporate outlet left of Fox News wrote waxing puff-pieces about an open letter, signed by over a thousand 'health professionals', calling for the continuation of these 'protests for racial justice' - despite what I'd been told was the most omnipresent, dangerous threat to my health since the Spanish Flu. Never mind the protestors against Whitmer in Michigan, whose policies even my parents considered excessive, were dismissed as nothing more than evil, science-denying trump supporters and white supremacists, and fosters of a super-spreader event of the highest order. All the while, the destruction and chaos I saw all, straight from the amateur streamers on the ground, was explained away as simply my lying eyes - the protests were 'fiery but mostly peaceful', or so the story went.
What little faith I had left crumbled to pieces in the coming weeks, as more and more riots broke out across America, with official responses ranging from muteness to outright support. Suddenly, the all-encompassing focus on Corona was thrown by the wayside, and as if by an invisible hand, the 'national conversation' had shifted away from a pandemic. You couldn't just ignore a pandemic, picking and choosing which mass gatherings in the street were 'safe', right? But social justice trumped social distance, and pick and choose they did.
It was perhaps at that time I realized that if the media could so brazenly lie about the protests, it followed that they were capable of lying about everything else, too. Yandex (Google being worse than useless) led me to Berenson, and it took a grand total of one day thereafter for the entire masquerade to come crashing down, taking a worldview of 18 long years with it.
I'm 66, and took the Moderna vaccine (2 doses) last Jan/Feb based on the advice of my doctor. I hesitated after listening to several people recommend against it, but in the end I trusted my doctor. (BTW - I've never taken the flu shot - I had no trouble refusing that one!) Wish I'd done the same for the Moderna shot, but what's done is done. It will be a very long time, if ever, before I trust most doctors and the government again. Sad to admit that I was a very naive 66 year old! I have many other reasons and many have already been mentioned - here's my partial list.
1. When "2 weeks to slow-the-spread to prevent hospital overcrowding" was extended.
2. When alternative therapies/solutions were ridiculed and called misinformation. (Ex. Drs. Sabine Gold, Peter McCollough, Pierre Kory and many others).
3. When the government/Fauci and msm didn't mention or encourage Americans to take steps to improve their immune systems by losing weight, and supplementing with zinc, Vit D, etc.).
4. When vaccines were recommended for all ages - yet 99.9+% survive the illness.
5. Illegal immigrants crossing the Texas border are not required to take the shots.
6. When the Indian province (Udder Pradesh??) and Mexico City basically killed Covid after distributing Home Kits (including Ivermectin) to their citizens.
7. Substack subscriptions - eugyppius and el gato malo have been most helpful to me. While much of the content and the comments are way beyond my ability to understand, I have learned so much and am very thankful.
8. Recently in North Texas white Texans have been denied monoclonal antibodies.
9. Two-hour episode with Mike Yeardon on Reiner Fuellmichs' Corona Investigative Committee's Jan. 7th podcast.
I knew by April 2020 that society was going insane. I'm not a genius. I asked obvious questions and saw that nobody in the mainstream was attempting to answer those obvious questions.
1. The medical literature from the previous decades said containment was a sham after a disease of this nature became widespread.
2. They weren't talking about the previous medical literature.
3. They didn't even attempt to provide reasons for disregarding previous norms.
4. They NEVER spoke of waves 2, 3, 4, etc. If lockdown stalls wave 1, why does that stop wave 2? It seemed like an obvious question that nobody cared to address. For months they acted as if COVID was going to be one wave then it's done.
5. COVID went from an modeled ~5% fatality rate to an actual ~0.15% very quickly. Nobody acknowledged it and the central planners changed none of their plans. It was obvious very early we weren't using data to inform our course of action.
One simple thing - there was a complete blocking of physician innovation on early treatment. I've never seen this before. Physicians normally collaborate to treat difficult or unusual illnesses. Never seen them lose licenses or be fired for doing so.
I knew something awful would happen to bring chaos to the 2020 Election so I was just waiting for it. When the media started censoring famous and well-respected doctors right away in February/March 2020, like Risch and Ioannidis, I knew what it was. Nothing ever made sense to me, after the first month.
Stanford scientist John Ioannidis finds himself under attack for questioning the prevailing wisdom about lockdowns. - April 2020
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-bearer-of-good-coronavirus-news-11587746176