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Readers of Revolver have known the truth about Covid-19 for well over a year now. The truth, reduced to a few key and essential facts, is as follows:

  • Covid-19 is, overall, not that deadly, and getting less deadly all the time.
  • Most of those who die of Covid are already unwell, often extremely unwell.
  • Most interventions to contain Covid, in particular lockdowns and ubiquitous masking, don’t work.
  • Children are nearly immune to Covid and do very little to spread it.
  • In terms of effect on America’s prosperity, stability, health, and mental well-being, the “cures” for Covid have been far more harmful than the disease itself.

For the past year, stating these facts could get a person banned from Facebook or shut down on YouTube and Twitter.

But now, abruptly, the Biden Administration and its mouthpieces are trying to make this the conventional wisdom. Sensing political calamity if it can’t get the country to move past Covid, what might be called the “West Wing” branch of progressivism desperately wants to adjust narratives and calm their base down, so that life (and the economy) can go back to normal.

Suddenly, all over the place, the old stalwarts of Covid hysteria are saying things that mere weeks ago constituted “misinformation” you could get censored for uttering. Shortly before Christmas, CNN medical analyst Leana Wen said something that was known before even the first Covid lockdowns 22 months ago: The loose-fitting cloth masks most people wear when forced don’t really do anything.

Also at CNN, host Jake Tapper decided that now is the perfect time to acknowledge that when hospitals fill up with “Covid” cases, a very large percentage are merely incidental infections.

A year and a half ago, Anthony Fauci made TV appearances warning of “serious consequences” if the U.S. didn’t remain in lockdown mode. Now, just after the new year, Anthony Fauci himself finally acknowledged the important difference between children being hospitalized for Covid versus the much much greater number hospitalized with Covid.

And then, most damning of all, there is CDC director Rochelle Walensky, who has done a tour of TV news in the past few days to admit that, yes, the vast majority of Covid deaths are people with a snarl of comorbidities that make them far more vulnerable than the average person. Of course, this being 2022, Wolensky also had to immediately apologize:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky apologized to disability advocates after calling it “encouraging” that most vaccinated individuals who have died from COVID-19 “were unwell to begin with,” but they say the CDC needs to do more.

Walensky drew ire from many with disabilities after an appearance earlier this month on ABC’s “Good Morning America” where she discussed a new study looking at the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.

“The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities, so really these are people who were unwell to begin with, and yes, really encouraging news in the context of omicron,” Walensky said during the appearance. “We’re really encouraged by these results.”

…

Walensky met with representatives from The Arc, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, the American Association of People with Disabilities and seven other organizations Friday afternoon to apologize for what the CDC described as a “hurtful, yet unintentional, statement pertaining to COVID-19 deaths and comorbidities.”

It’s not just TV rhetoric, either. Walensky’s CDC recently changed its quarantine guidance to say that individuals who test positive for Covid-19 should isolate for just five days instead of ten.

On January 5, Time published epidemiologist Steven Phillips’ prediction (or rather, plea) that “2022 Is The Year We Learn To Live With COVID-19.” In the article, Phillips all but begs his readers, mostly white liberals, to accept that they are never going to stamp out Covid, and must let themselves live in a world where Covid is just another disease that people get rather than an exceptional threat that everyone’s lives must revolve around.

Hopes of eliminating COVID-19 in the U.S. through vaccine-generated herd immunity are now dashed. Instead, with the rapid spread of the highly infectious Omicron variant, we need to focus on 2022 as the year that in the U.S. will usher in a new era of “living with the virus.”

In epidemiology terms this means transitioning from pandemicity to endemicity, as the virus moves from its phase of widespread devastation to episodic local flare-ups and settles into long-term cohabitation with its human host. [Time]

Phillips isn’t quite telling the truth. It isn’t the Omicron variant that dashed the hopes of eliminating Covid-19. Those hopes were dashed all the way back in March 2020, when the virus spread despite all containment measures, and developed a general presence in the American population. From that moment, every stunt to “stop” Covid has been so much theater and pointless drama.

In the UK, senior medical leaders are begging the public to make the same transition. Clive Dix, the former head of Britain’s vaccine task force, says the government should abandon mass vaccination efforts after its current booster campaign wraps up:

With health chiefs and senior Tories also lobbying for a post-pandemic plan for a straining NHS, Dr Clive Dix called for a major rethink of the UK’s Covid strategy, in effect reversing the approach of the past two years and returning to a “new normality”.

“We need to analyse whether we use the current booster campaign to ensure the vulnerable are protected, if this is seen to be necessary,” he said. “Mass population-based vaccination in the UK should now end.”

He said ministers should urgently back research into Covid immunity beyond antibodies to include B-cells and T-cells (white blood cells). This could help create vaccines for vulnerable people specific to Covid variants, he said, adding: “We now need to manage disease, not virus spread. So stopping progression to severe disease in vulnerable groups is the future objective.” [The Guardian]

The burning question now is: Will this work? Last May, Revolver wrote about the initial abortive efforts of the Biden Administration and its allies to scale back the cult of the mask as cases declined and vaccination spread:

Whatever its political shortcomings, the Biden administration wants the country reopened and things (mostly) back to normal so they can reap the political dividends of undoing the calamitous lockdowns that liberal ideology created in the first place.

There’s just one problem: The regime’s propaganda was too effective. Millions of loyal cattle are too traumatized to go back to their old way of life. In a recent poll conducted by The Hill, forty-two percent of registered voters and a majority of Democrats said that, regardless of advice from the CDC or other health officials, everybody should still wear masks outdoors no matter what.

…

What is happening right now with masks isn’t science. It’s a new cult, created through a mix of political pressure and old-fashioned terror. This cult, created almost by accident, is now too entrenched and too powerful to be turned off by the people who created it.

READ THE REST: Mask Psychosis: NYT Confirms The Liberal Mask Cult Is Here to Stay

As it was then, so it remains now. There is a small rational faction desperately trying to control the lumbering beast of perpetual progressive panic, and right now, they are losing. The Biden Administration, for instance, has explicitly taken the position that schools should be open and offering in-person classes.

“The president’s been very clear, as we have been clear: We are on the side of schools being open,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday.

It’s good that Biden wants schools open, because schools should be open. Children are at statistically near-zero risk from Covid, and they do almost nothing to spread it either. Even in the early days of coronavirus, countries like Denmark and Sweden kept schools open without seeing the feared explosion in disease.

Several states like South Dakota have had in-person classes since the start of the 2020-21 school year without doing noticeably worse than other states. The Biden Administration, no doubt motivated by fear of a political waning next November, finally considered actual science and common sense.

But there is something else going on here, something that says a lot about the operation of the Globalist American Empire and how it is headed toward a meltdown.

For a good moderate citizen who just wants to “listen to the experts,” life is more bewildering by the day. The experts and “authoritative sources” keep changing their minds on things. “Misinformation” long ago stopped being false information, or even heretical information that defied official narratives. Now, “misinformation” is simply anything that contradicts the specific emphasis from official sources at this very moment. One can spread “misinformation” by believing the official narrative just a couple weeks too long, or a couple weeks too early. Practically any statement from public health officials in the first three months of 2020 would be misinformation if repeated today.

In big picture terms, then, that means the crusade against misinformation is not a tool designed to enforce belief in any particular piece of information, or “the truth” write large. Instead, it is designed to enforce loyalty to certain sources of information. The only way to be entirely safe from the misinformation label is to mindlessly reaffirm the latest declarations from a handful of official and quasi-official outlets. The push to demonize misinformation is therefore a push to consolidate all narrative control in the hands of a few regime-approved (and regime-compliant) institutions.

Fascinatingly, though, this effort might be failing, simply because progressives stoked the furnace of Covid hysteria too much, and now the panic has spread out of their control. Because, try as it might to change narratives, the Biden Administration can’t get progressives to play along.

This month several high schools in Portland swerved back to online-only learning after teachers began to absent themselves in droves. Milwaukee schools went back into distance learning as well. In Chicago, the city’s unionized public school teachers simply canceled a week of classes after deciding that it was “too dangerous” for them to show up and do their jobs. The teachers only agreed to show up and work once again after the district agreed to even more onerous testing requirements in order to detect every school child with the slightest trace of virus in their system.

Colleges are if anything more deranged in response to even less risk. In the Ivy League, Yale and Princeton are still embracing totalitarianism as their preferred response to even the most mild of Covid threats:

This week Yale sent out an email laying out requirements for returning students. According to the Yale Daily News, there will be a campus-wide quarantine until Feb. 7, which may be extended. Furthermore, students “may not visit New Haven businesses or eat at local restaurants (even outdoors) except for curbside pickup.”

Meanwhile, in Princeton, the university issued this announcement on Dec. 27: “Beginning January 8 through mid-February, all undergraduate students who have returned to campus will not be permitted to travel outside of Mercer County or Plainsboro Township for personal reasons, except in extraordinary circumstances. … We’ll revisit and, if possible, revise this travel restriction by February 15.”

…

If Princeton or Yale took the position that the current state of Covid is so potentially dangerous that the entire university must be shut down, that would at least be consistent (and, in March 2020, I agreed with that view). But these policies do not and indeed cannot insulate these universities from the outside world. The omicron strain is going to spread at Princeton and Yale regardless of whether students gather at Hoagie Haven or Modern Apizza.

The selectivity is stunning. The Princeton policy restricts the travel of undergraduates, but what of the other people affiliated with the university, such as faculty, staff or contractors? The Yale policy prevents students from patronizing local New Haven businesses, but what if a professor wants to drive up to Cambridge?

The assumption seems to be that the virus spreads in particular ways that can be controlled by a university with virtually no enforcement apparatus. It is all but impossible to imagine an enforcement of these rules that is in any way universal and fair. [Bloomberg]

Meanwhile, the progressive rank and file, the “NPCs” who once reliably adopted every new firmware upgrade without question or complaint, are suddenly rebelling against the order to take Covid less seriously.

In California, professional nurses have erupted at the suggestion that those with asymptomatic Covid cases should probably just keep working, instead of taking two weeks off over an infection they wouldn’t even notice without a constant churn of testing.

In other words, for now, the flailing reprogamming effort is failing. The Biden Administration wants its rank-and-file followers in public schools, colleges, and hospitals to calm down. Instead they remain as paranoid as ever. It is entirely possible that this will continue for all of 2022, or even longer. Covid and its variants aren’t going away. To the extent they were ever effective at all, vaccines appear to lose their potency with every new booster campaign. The virus remains as mild for most people as ever, but constant testing means that even the healthiest progressives have worked themselves into a permanent state of fear and paranoia.

This has fascinating ramifications for leftism itself. Through Mass Formation Psychosis, the ruling class left seems to have finally memed its true believers into a pattern that it can’t talk them out of. For two years, they sowed panic by promoting the cult of the mask, the cult of the lockdown, and the cult of the vaccine. Now, they can’t suppress the cults they have created. Similarly, they ignited a “racial reckoning” in 2020 and are now powerless to stop the frenzy of murder and crime that this “reckoning” unleashed in every major city.

The Globalist American Empire is losing control of its own followers. And if it can’t control them, how much longer can it hope to control you?

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