What are you afraid of?
It doesn’t really matter. Not that I’m callous and don’t care about your fears, it’s just that in a normal world I can’t do anything about them, only you can. Because fear exists only in the mind of the person experiencing it. But here’s where politics comes in and messes it all up; using the coercive power of government, I can make you react to my fear.
As I questioned in my previous post (a LONG time ago; March 30, 2020), how deadly is COVID in the absence of underlying health conditions? As it turns out, not very. The CDC, not paragons of truth and accuracy by any means (but we take what we can get), has stated that about 10,000 people died from solely COVID-19 so far in 2020. For perspective, that many deaths (from all sources) occurred in approximately 36 hours in 2019. I’m no more afraid of COVID than I am my toaster. What we need to do is have a sober look at why these 200,000 or so people actually died. It was a combination of old age and bad habits (poor diet, mainly) and not some novel virus that we can’t save ourselves from without massive upheaval and a total reimagining of how we live our lives. Rather than scare people about the long-term health risks of poor nutrition and lack of sunlight and exercise, scaremongers will inflate the average person’s risk of death or serious complication, then the bought-and-paid-for “experts” echo their nonsense. You see, talking about nutrition is boring as hell, and no one wants to be lectured about their eating and exercise habits, even if it will make them feel better and extend their lives. Scary as shit virus, though? Bring it!
Here’s a hypothetical: Let’s just say that a mystery illness starts spreading around the world in late 2019. You’re a monomaniacal epidemiologist who’s looking to get out of public service in a couple years and you want to make a splash so you can get more money from books and speaking engagements when you retire. So you say in a meeting one day that this mystery illness is troubling and bears further study. They start to look and see similar cases on multiple continents. A couple weeks later there’s an outbreak near a biolab in China where you have some investments and it has all the hallmarks of a bad influenza, also matching a number of symptoms in previous cases. You seize the moment and make some public pronouncement about this potentially being a dangerous pandemic. Other opportunists jump on the fearmonger bandwagon and start to write papers and studies about this new virus and how world-ending it could potentially be. Computer modelers who, like politicians and economists, are never correct and never ever apologize for being wrong, jump in and produce all kinds of charts and graphs that predict massive casualties and overcrowded hospitals and finally! the politicians hear calls to DO SOMETHING. At last! Your moment to shine! Now, policy is based on whatever the fuck you decide to say next. And no matter how wrong you are at every turn, you can claim that since this is all new and unknown you can’t possibly be blamed for acting on incorrect or incomplete information, no matter how many dissenters have been saying so the whole time. (I’m not suggesting that’s how it went, but you can see how it could, right?)
That brings me to fear, ignorance, and political power. Unscrupulous people can manipulate ignorant people to feel fear about something they don’t understand. And no one fully understands human health. A monomaniac who can direct policy can ignore a lot of bigger problems that are outside his or her area of specialty. What does Fauci know about economics? Rhetorical question; nothing, or he wouldn’t have made the recommendations he did and continues to do. If you concentrate only on communicable diseases, you ignore a vast array of health concerns that cost millions of lives every year, as well as ignoring every other non-medical cause of death.
Shutting down society has had and will continue to cost more lives than any virus ever could.
Healthy humans don’t have much to fear from viruses, but fewer and fewer of us can be considered “healthy” these days, especially being locked down, kept away from each other and the outdoors, and the things and places that make us happy. Getting back to regular life and making positive changes in our food intake (by eliminating as many processed foods as possible) will do us all a lot of good and make getting sick less and less likely or harmful. I’ve personally never been healthier since I fired my “let’s-get-you-a-pill-for-that” retired Air Force doctor and took responsibility for my health and what I put in me. I lost a lot of weight and stopped the problem that made me take all those pills in the first place.
I hate to be so hacky, but like Frank Herbert said, “fear is the mind-killer”. Don’t be so paralyzed by fear that you stop asking questions and seeking truth. Don’t be shamed into doing something that doesn’t feel right by some asshole pulling the argument from authority on you; you don’t have to be a doctor to see that what is going on has nothing to do with health or saving lives, it’s about controlling you through fear. One final note: Experts are kept honest by skeptics, not sycophants.
