This is a deep, deep problem. I hope it’s not intractable. Jay Battacharya has a heavy lift. The way so many used the pandemic to seize power over the lives of others reminds me a lot of the climate scam.
[Afternoon update]
A thing we don't talk about enough is how bad the CDC guidance was for opening things up during Covid
— PoIiMath (@politicalmath) April 27, 2025
Read the details! It was insanely unrealistic but was used by states to act in very insane wayshttps://t.co/Ona38iTQXI
A word has been coined to describe our public health bureaucracy: idiocracy. I’ll leave it at that.
I often forget about Covid beginning under Trump. His actions were an overreach but seemed consistent for trying to manage a global pandemic. However, things got out of hand quickly, and the leadership in blue state and local areas got absurd, and more absurd as they gained control at the federal level. Even today, Covid is used by some to demand isolation. It is no longer a physical threat to a person as it is a psychological threat to a person.
The fear of getting COVID is way worse than getting COVID. Although I had it last fall and was down for a month. Previous times it was in and out in a couple of days to a week. I chalk up the weirdness to how COVID affects people differently to it being a man made virus.
I don’t know about that. I was/am in the higher hazard age category but the more I educated myself about COVID-19 the less I feared it. Outside of age I really didn’t have any other significant comorbidities to worry about. Understanding it as a corona-virus, knowing how fragile they are when one soaks up lots of UV and sunlight as we were heading into the summer months in 2020 and understanding how it affected the body from early ER reports, actually put me at ease. I always considered masking a farce. But in order to go grocery shopping I relented rather than starve. I never came down with the Alpha, Beta, or Delta variants. Eventually I succumbed to it last December. Way past Omicron. And post vaccination. (I’ll probably not bother with anymore). It was a bitch. Really sick for two weeks and then another month to get past the sniffles. Most notable was the fatigue that came with it. A PITA, but not as bad as not being able to buy TP in March 2020. Nor anything nearly as acute as to when I had a case of the Swine Flu in the summer of ’09.
I think it was all a fascinating look at policy and human nature colliding. Also a misunderstanding of the threat and the risk. But the biggest takeaway is that relying on a bureaucracy to make good decisions in a time of crisis is a recipe for disaster and that when the next round comes along (and it will) we should have a better planning option in place, like yesterday.
“Another key factor, Zweig argues, was the stark political polarization of discourse purporting to pit the “science-based community” of enlightened managerial progressivism against the drooling hordes of backward Trumpism.”
This is why the pharmaceutical companies lied about the vaccines during the election. Put whatever one feels about the vaccines now aside and remember that when Trump said the vaccines would be ready in a month or whatever he said, they lied and said they wouldn’t only to release the vaccines the day after the election.