The Covid Doctrine

How policy for Covid-19 is shaping up for 2022

As I’ve said on multiple occasions, the Pandemic ended as a topic of great concern for me in April of 2020 when age-specific infection mortality rates and other data emerged.

It was way back then that we learned:

• This is a disease of old, sick, and obese people

• Children and young people have virtually no risk above other baseline health risks

• Repurposed drugs for early treatment were promising

• It’s another coronavirus and it behaves like other respiratory viruses before it

My posts during that period may have helped some people maintain their sanity by putting the realities of Covid-19 into perspective, but unfortunately, most people are largely ignorant of the facts and nuances of the virus and disease.

Our health officials, driven by an egomaniacal god complex and amplified by sensationalist mainstream media painted an apocalyptic and largely irrational picture of what this pandemic was actually about. Combined with early stories and imagery as well as the mishaps of early disease treatment (ex: ventilators), the narrative of overflowing ERs, triaging of patients, and overflowing body-bags was created early on.

Out of this chaos, lack of information, and general promotion of fear, something I call the Covid-Doctrine emerged.

By the time the push-back started to gain traction, it was already too late…the Covid Doctrine had already been established as the unquestionable “scientific” way forward.

So what is the Covid Doctrine?

It’s a completely arbitrary set of principles that were laughably modeled around China’s early Covid policies. Over time they’ve added to it, but in reality, not much has changed since the early days of “15 Days to Stop the Spread”.

What are examples of the Covid Doctrine?

• Lock-downs

• Quarantines

• Mass Testing

• Contact Tracing

• Mask Wearing/Mandates

• Zero Covid/Safetyism - one Covid case or death is one too many

• Vaccination and boosting of everybody (including children)

• School closings

The five major characteristics of the Covid Doctrine are:

• No cost-benefit analysis is necessary when crafting these principles - the only consideration is that any human life is priceless

• There is very little room for re-assessment of policy based on new information

• Little to vague proof is necessary to establish these principles

• There is very little room for nuance - we are dealing with “settled science” after all. If you disagree with any part of the Covid Doctrine, you are an anti-science conspiracy theorist and are no longer welcome in polite society

• The Key Feature: There is no defined metric which once achieved would signal the end of the pandemic and therefore the Covid Doctrine

I covered all this before when I pointed out that the policies created for Covid had no resemblance to existing Pandemic Plans drafted by the CDC and WHO. Our public health experts basically made up all the policies out of thin air.

Gummi Bear @gummibear737

Deep-Dive: Pandemic Planning - Then, Now Our “Public Health Experts” are making recommendations on: -Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) -Risk-benefit in public health -Ethical issues Which break with all previous plans prepared by public health institutions (CDC/WHO) 1

Let’s put things into perspective!

Try this thought experiment:

• Imagine how much new information and knowledge has emerged in the nearly two years since the pandemic began.

• Now ask yourself how much have the policies or strategies changed?

• Finally, ask yourself how this is possible?

These were not time-tested strategies…they were invented in the Spring of 2020. Yet they got them all so correct that nothing has changed in two years?

Here comes Omicron! What should we do? Let’s test our way out of the pandemic…yeah, that’s the ticket!

It’s obvious that something else is going on here because this is not how anything works in real life. The government has never been all-knowing…yet we are required to believe that they are in this case…more likely they want you to think this so that they may become all-powerful.

It’s really about using a crisis (pandemic) to push forward the ideological agenda that Government can solve all your problems…and if they can’t it’s because you haven’t given them enough power.

Despite the efforts of many people who have tried to push back on the Covid Doctrine, public opinion is still mostly split.

Aside from issues such as in-person learning for children and no Chinese-style lock-downs, there is still enough public support for the Covid Doctrine to keep it in place.

This poll was really quite disheartening for me.

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Why are Democratic politicians acting like school closures are a huge political liability? Well, because they are. Shifting schools to remote learning is opposed 30-66 in the latest Suffolk/USA Today poll. Even a majority of Democrats (52%) oppose. suffolk.edu/-/media/suffol…

Throughout this pandemic, I’ve thought to myself many times that “If only X would happen then we could finally be done with Covid”.

The only problem is that every time that “X” occurred, they just moved the goalposts.

The most blatant example of this is with the Omicron variant.

The history of every respiratory virus pandemic is that the virus evolves to become more transmissible and less deadly. Thus is becomes endemic and we go on with our lives and the virus fades into the background of other seasonal respiratory viruses that freely circulate among us.

Lo and behold, we had the arrival of the new Omicron variant. After getting past the initial concern that it was “monstrously mutated” and was super transmissible, we learned that it was actually not very virulent at all.

In fact, this was the big “X” I had been waiting for. What better news for the Christmas holiday than the fact that Covid was going endemic?

Gummi Bear @gummibear737

What would you call a highly transmissible C-19 variant that conveys natural immunity to those it infects but doesn't cause much sickness or death? A Christmas Blessing

And yet, the Covid Doctrine continues to dominate.

So here we are again in the middle of a Pandemic…a PCR pandemic if you want to be more accurate.

How does this happen?

First, there will always be a Covid-19 variant actively circulating in the populations…forever.

The dirty truth is that Covid-19 will never go away and we’re all going to be exposed/infected by it at some point. Run, hide…it will still find you. That’s a reality that most people refuse to accept.

This dude has been reporting on Covid for ages and is just now coming to terms with the fact that this is not hyperbole.

James Surowiecki @JamesSurowiecki

When people say Covid will infect everyone, and probably multiple times, do they mean “everyone”? Or is it a hyperbolic way of saying “most ppl, at least once”?

And just as I am writing this, even Fauci comes out and admits as much.

We’re all gonna get infected eventually.

Small consolation for those of us who have been pointing this out forever.

The Hill @thehill

“Omicron, with its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of efficiency of transmissibility, will, ultimately, find just about everybody,” Fauci said.

hill.cmFauci: Omicron will infect ‘just about everybody’Infectious disease expert and White House chief medical adviser A...

Anyways…

Second, is a little-known or discussed reality of ordinary coronaviruses.

There are 4 previously existing coronaviruses that are considered the common cold:

• HCoV-OC43

• HCoV-HKU1

• HCoV-229E

• HCoV-NL63

These were all more virulent at some point in time. In fact, there is some scientific belief that OC43 may have been responsible for the “Russian Flu” in the 1890s.

They are all now endemic and are at worse a cold for most people.

SARS-CoV-2 will eventually settle into this group as an endemic coronavirus.

But as it turns out, the common cold coronaviruses are actually deadly in their own right…especially for older people.

This has been shown in studies of outbreaks of the common coronavirus where as many as 8% of elderly patients died:

Gummi Bear @gummibear737

CoV-OC43, a common cold coronavirus which shows cross-reactive properties with SARS-CoV, killed 8/95 infected patients at an old age home in 2003 Coronaviruses are deadly for the old - never tested before This is what Omicron is - but now we’re testing

hindawi.comAn Outbreak of Human Coronavirus OC43 Infection and Serological Cross-Reactivity with SARS CoronavirusBACKGROUND: In summer 2003, a respiratory outbreak was investigated in British Columbia, during which nucleic acid tests and serology unexpectedly indicated reactivity for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV).METHODS: Cases at a care facility were epidemiologically characterized …

In fact, if we were actively testing for these coronaviruses we might actually think them to be quite virulent.

But we don’t do that, and so they remain known as the common cold because that is what they are to the vast majority of people.

Now enter the dominant C19 Omicron variant. Remember that awesome strategy they came up with: Let’s test everybody for the most transmissible variant yet (this is the part where I roll my eyes). Hey Fauci, Spring of 2020 called and they want their stupid strategy back.

We know that Omicron is much milder, but it is still a coronavirus and like its existing cousins, it will still kill some older or sicker people.

But with all the testing, the experts only see “Covid Deaths”…and under the Covid Doctrine, any death is one death too many…and cases are always considered bad

So where does this leave us?

1. The Covid Doctrine has been adopted by virtually all first world countries to varying extents…it’s “settled science” in most health institutions

2. They will still be able to identify Covid cases and subsequent deaths forever because new variants will always emerge and common cold coronaviruses kill

3. The unvaccinated/unboosted and those opposed to the Covid Doctrine will continue to be the whipping boy for unsuccessful Covid Doctrine policy

4. We still have no criteria for what the official end of the pandemic would look like

What does this mean for 2022?

I’m not sure how much can change given how Omicron has been handled so far.

It’s the same old playbook, the same old talking points, and the same old figureheads.

I just don’t see the Fauci’s of the world turning around and admitting that cases don’t matter that much and shifting their strategies away from trying to prevent the transmission of a virus that we’re all going to get eventually.

What can be done?

1. To those who think a Civil War is coming…not gonna happen. I understand the anger and frustration, but violence or secession are not options.

   Paul Poast @ProfPaulPoast

   Why did 🇺🇸 have a civil war? And why is one unlikely today? [THREAD]

   

2. More and more people are speaking out, but the institutions that have the power to make changes are ideologically captive. Change in this context is slow and happens over decades, not months and years.

3. Political change is the only real solution, but that requires voting and lots of it because you need strong political mandates to try and make the institutional changes necessary to fix a broken system. The upcoming elections will be crucial in this sense.

4. What would make a huge difference is if people on the Democratic left would come out forcefully against the Covid Doctrine. There are already some voices like Bill Maher, but the backlash from their side would be so big that it’s hard to see enough people sticking their necks out on this.

I tend to be optimistic, but after seeing the evolution of policy surrounding Omicron I’m not sure Covidians are changing their position anytime soon.

Omicron mutated from a nothing burger (which should actually have been considered good news) into a Casedemic with stricter mandates, school closings, and apocalyptic messages from our leaders.

I just don’t see how we easily extirpate ourselves from the Covid Doctrine.

But we certainly can’t and won’t stop trying!

Who knows? At some point maybe it collapses under the weight of its own absurdity.