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I came here to post "Normies stopped talking about it because the media stopped talking about it", so in that sense I agree entirely. Absent the daily orders of What Current Thing To Support being beamed into their devices 24/7, the Normie does not support it, and so when the media messaging stops, the Covid hawks vanish.
I'll also give a moderate agreement on your reasoning as to why the media stopped. Reminding people about Covid might remind them of a glaring example of how Big Government (and it's Cathedral tentacles in academia, NGOs, media, civil society, experts) fucked up. Which is a line of thought they want to assiduously avoid planting in the proles' heads, so better to just memory-hole the whole experience.
But the Covid hawks are very specifically not the normies. They're the guys who kept the faith long after the normies stopped. The Covid hawks are dissidents, and in some sense have at least considered themselves dissidents for the whole duration of the pandemic (after all, in most Western countries, the measures stopped far short of what the hawks were demanding at various points, and were run down far sooner than the hawks would have preferred.)
I wouldn't underestimate the commitment of normies. When the messaging was on the side of the true Covid hawks the average person was almost indistinguishable from them.
If the Covid hawks are dissidents they only became dissidents after their support evaporated. Before that they were something else... a dissident is on the outskirts of a tribe, they distinguished themselves by being more fervently tribal than those around them.
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I have the same grudging respect for people that all still all-in on Covidism that I do for the farthest fringe religious believers, the guys that take the Koran completely literally. Most people kind of shrugged at Covid policies and halfassedly followed along. They might have been somewhat scared, but still gone along with going out with their friends, or they might have thought the whole thing was silly, but still gone along with masking. Likewise, most people that say they believe a given religion kind-of sort-of follow it, but might fudge a bit around the edges when it comes to literal interpretations or inconveniences like abstinence until marriage. Not the fundamentalists or Covid hawks though! In the year of our Lord 2023, they maintain that if that's the word of Allah, you need to follow it completely and that if Covid justified society-level shutdowns in 2020, the fact that it still exists means that you should at least wear a mask if not avoid all crowds entirely. I think the premises of both of these groups are incredibly incorrect, but I do have to respect the willingness to follow their principles to their logical conclusions.
For the people who are still all-in (at least in the US), it's not really about COVID and it never was. These are the kind of germophobes who wiped everything down with sanitizer and insisted that guests wash their hands when entering their homes long before COVID hit. When certain policies that played into their neuroticism became mainstream for a brief period in response to a specific threat, they latched onto them, and were surprised and appalled that the public abandoned them whenever the threat was over. If COVID were eradicated tomorrow these people wouldn't all of the sudden throw their masks away and stop caring about safety precautions, they'd go back to the germophobes they were in 2019 and argue that there are still plenty of other diseases out there that we should be requiring all these precautions to prevent.
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