From 1965-71, CBS aired a sitcom entitled Green Acres. The show’s protagonist, Oliver Wendell Douglas, was an NYC lawyer who bought a farm and, several years ahead of the zeitgeist, went back to the land. In Hooterville, his adopted domicile, Oliver wears a three-piece suit while he rides his tractor and is surrounded by hicks, hucksters and bumbling bureaucrats. The show portrays this naive romantic’s daily encounters with the loony locals and his ingenuous, Hungarian immigrant, incongruously glamorous, reluctant farm wife, Lisa, who’s also a very bad cook. Every interaction ends with Oliver exasperated by the ludicrous statements or conduct of those in his new sphere.
I remember this surrealistic show as having been quite funny. Seeing other people at wit’s end is often amusing.
But living through Coronamania put me at wit’s end. I didn’t fear The Ro for one minute. Having developed, over time, some working knowledge of Biology, Systems Ecology and human health, and being skeptical about media and government, the viral threat seemed to me way overblown from Day 1.
I doubt I was ever infected, though one February, 2020 afternoon I felt a little funny, took a nap and thereafter had an otherwise unexplained dry cough for a week. At that time, I might have tested 40 cycle PCR positive for Covid. But then, so did tangerines.
Nor did I ever directly know anyone who died from Covid. Among the many hundreds of people I know, only five knew a purported Covid decedent; each ostensible victim was very old and/or very baseline unhealthy. This anecdotal evidence mirrored the obvious, and biologically unsurprising, statistical trend, which the media conveniently ignored. The public also lost sight of Covid’s demographically clear risk profile.
Not a single thing happened in March, 2020, or in the ensuing 28 months, to make me rethink my initial perception that the virus presented functionally zero risk to anyone healthy, under 70. Even the vast majority of the old, overweight or immuno-compromised were very likely to survive a virus that the media histrionically portrayed and that many, including Trump, wrongly considered “The Plague.”
It later became known—but was grossly underreported—that many of the ostensible Covid deaths were falsely attributed to Covid because of perverse CARES Act financial incentives to hospitals; that treatment protocols caused many deaths; and that inexpensive, alternative early treatments or self-care delivered far better outcomes than did the protocols that hospitals commonly applied.
From the outset, I foresaw high costs—economic, social and psychological—to shuttering society. I directly experienced some of those consequences: the boredom, the lost life experiences and lost savings, via federal spending-driven inflation. Many—especially younger—people I know suffered far more than I did. It was obvious that the purported public health benefits of locking down, masking, testing and taking much-hyped jabs wouldn’t justify these human costs. A February 2, 2022 Johns Hopkins study resolutely confirmed this hypothesis.
Yet, for me and others, the hardest part of the past 28 months has been being surrounded by so many people so deeply out of touch with reality. For 28 months, I’ve/we’ve felt like Oliver Wendell Douglas in Hooterville. Without the laugh track. We could discuss at length whether The Gods Must Be Crazy. But without question—and I’m not trying to be funny—we learned that many people around us are.
And badly misinformed to boot. So many people vastly overstated Coronavirus peril. Forty-one percent of Democrats thought that over 50% of the infected ended up in the hospital, while another 28 percent of Democrats put that figure between 20% and 49%. The real number was between 1%-5%. Twenty-eight percent of Democrats polled believed that 10% of those infected, died; many thought 30% of the infected, died. The real infection fatality rate was well under 1%. Another poll revealed that many Democrats—including some I knew—believed the virus had killed 10% of all Americans, i.e., 33 million people. Think briefly about what that would look like.
The misled also naively overrated human ability to stop viral transmission. And they knew nothing about the statistical chicanery applied to death tolls, case counts and vaxx outcomes. The shots’ benefits were egregiously oversold and the injections’ injuries have been systematically hidden. Emerging data show that the jabs raise, not lower, the risk of infection and death. Despite all of the prior hype and support for the shots—and mandates—the long-term “vaccine” safety picture may get very ugly.
I was vexed by such pervasive ignorance, fear, gullibility, dishonesty and hucksterism. It came, non-stop, from all directions: government, TV, newspapers, radio, the Net, Pharma, people in the street, neighbors, college students, employers, friends and family—though thankfully, with some notable exceptions, like my wife, two siblings, two in-laws, two cousins and the astute, though “uneducated” Mexican immigrants with whom I work. And unlike watching Green Acres, I couldn’t turn off the craziness around me after a half hour had passed. Soon after seeing the first wave of fearmongering, I blacked out all of the mainstream sources of (actual) misinformation. But I inevitably had to deal with or watch many irrationally fearful people.
Instead of the Green Acres’ characters’ amiable goofiness, the people to whom I expressed my Coronamania critique reacted with misplaced, oft-angry certainty that this was a terrible crisis that threatened everyone, that non-maskers caused it and non-vaxxers perpetuated it. Those with the least factual knowledge were the Covid interventions’ biggest backers.
As you did, I repeatedly heard people anxiously recite soundbites learned from the media, such as:
“We’re all in this together!”
“It’s a novel virus!”
“We’re living through history!”
“This is serious. My friend’s (87 year-old) father-in-law died from it!”
“I’m following ‘CDC protocols’ to ‘flatten the curve’/’stop the spread!’”
“If it only saves one life!”
“I won’t meet you for an outdoor dinner when you pass through my state because you’re from New Jersey and infections there are ‘spiking.’” (People loved that word; it sounded scientifically sophisticated, up-to-the-minute and scary).
“Why should I listen to you? You’re not an MD!”
Later, dozens of people—including three MDs who expressly pulled rank—assured me that the shots were: “really good!”, “safe and effective,” “a technological marvel” and that “they’ll make this all go away,” that “everyone needed to take them” and that those who refused to inject were “selfish and endangered others.”
Etc.
LOL. The derisive kind.
Tens of millions hid at home and ate delivered food. They wore masks while walking or driving alone, even after taking the “vaxxes” in which they so strongly believed.
Day after day, week after week, month after month for 28 months, I heard people invoke the shibboleth, and parrot the mantra: “Pandemic!” Uttering this magic word was intended to justify any disruption of normal life, to excuse the failure to fulfill a wide range of personal responsibilities and to foreclose any reasonable discussion/dissent that might support the conclusion that the orchestrated, opportunistic overreaction to a respiratory virus was a complete, avoidable, government and media-made meltdown.
I saw all of the Pandemanium dogma as lies. Time has proven me right; statements that caused Medium.com to de-platform me have turned out to be undeniably true. After 18 months of Vaxx Fascism, hucksters like Fauci and Birx have finally admitted that the vaxxes don’t stop the spread. The White House now admits what I and many others said in March, 2020: widespread infection can’t be thwarted.
What will they admit next?
Throughout the past 28 months, most people with whom I came into contact believed more strongly in the “experts” Corona falsehoods than they believed in anything else. It was pathetic and maddening.
Astoundingly, after all this time and all of the lockdown/mask/testing/jab failure, some of the brainwashed still cling to the notion that a respiratory virus that nearly everyone survives remains a serious threat, and that all should mask, test and boost up. Even those who have belatedly perceived the folly of these interventions won’t admit that their alarmism has been groundless, and extremely harmful.
Instead of enduring this epic episode of mass psychosis, I might have preferred that some natural disaster had hit my area. Of course, unlike Covid, a natural disaster would have killed vital people. I would have hated that. A natural disaster would also have disrupted communities and lives, and cost individuals and society a lot of resources. But even combining the strongest hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and forest fires ever to hit the US would have caused far less disruption than has the anthropogenic overreaction to an infection that most people experience as a cold.
At least the occurrence and effects of a heat wave/drought (as we are now having, and which impairs my efforts to grow food at my parched, formerly Green, Acres), an earthquake or a hurricane would have been objectively undeniable and unavoidable. I could have understood and shared other peoples’ grief and dread and respected their judgment. I could have exchanged spoken reason with them and not have been expected to validate panic and to go along with an ever-changing set of plainly ridiculous “mitigation” measures.
It would have made far more sense to do things like hand out food and water and rebuild flattened buildings than it did to test and trace. Who conceived and funded the 70 plus-billion-dollar testing debacle and the other CARES Act political plums? How many humans could have been fed and housed with the trillions wasted on “Covid Relief?”
In contrast to Coronamania, natural disaster damage would have would have been of limited geographic extent and duration. Instead of feeling Covid-based alienation from unhinged others, mutually experiencing a natural disaster would have inspired a sense of solidarity with my countrymen. (I grew up in a neighborhood that flooded most years; families riding rowboats down streets gushing mudwater). I’d have been far less pessimistic about our collective future than I’ve been for the past 28 months.
Since Day 1, the whole thing has felt to me like a PsyOp against both the fearful and the sane. Those who effected it broke a lot of people.
But the Hootervillians couldn’t break Oliver Wendell Douglas. And the Coronamaniacs won’t break me.
Mark Oshinskie is an attorney, athlete, artist, agricultor, and advocate.