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Notes -
Biden: Pandemic is over
Of course, for all important purposes, pandemic has been over in most of the Western world for most of this year - ie. sure, there's a disease going around, but the "pandemic mentality" is gone, and so have at least the most visible and onerous restrictions - but this sort of a declaration, offhand and qualified as it is, seems like a point in the general development.
It's already evident in social media that COVID doomers - the ones who would still want to mask up, keep up restrictions etc. - are angry and frustrated, as they've been for months, but I also wonder how the sort of "reverse doomers" who declared a year ago that Western world is never going to declare the pandemic over and give up restrictions, either out of stupidity or out of a malignant conspiracy, are interpreting it.
Speaking as a reverse doomer, (I believe that Covid deaths were exaggerated from the beggining with extremely high threshold PCR tests that give many false positives along with counting people who got hit by a bus but tested positive for Covid 59 days previous as a "Covid death." {With versus from.} Not to mention the flu completely disappearing from 2020, that was weird.)
So, having established my bona fides, speaking as a reverse doomer, I see Biden's statemement as the rankest hypocrisy. The emergency use authorization is still in place. Many places still have mandates for the neovaccines. Biden hasn't broached the subject of excess deaths in highly neovaccinated countries or the concomitant rise in cancers. The new mouse "vaccine" is a case in point. If the pandemic is over, then why are we approving medicine that was only tested on a dozen mice to be used on humans?
So I feel anger. This is a limited hangout.
It's not merely rankest hypocrisy. It's also not a return to normal. Normal is when people who impose e.g. false imprisonment get dragged through the courts and then sentenced for their crimes. Certainly I can't imagine many people in 2019 responding to "what should be done to a leader who -list of restrictions-" with anything less than a few court cases.
This is naive. "Normal" is when disgraced politicians and high-ranking bureacrats golden-parachute their way out of power, like they always have. Sometimes, when a foreign invader or violent revolution dismantles a government, they may hold a few responsible. Sometimes. But in "normal" circumstances, governments do not hold themselves responsible.
If I thought it was the case that this was the only way to return to the pre-2020 consensus that imprisoning the entire population for no reason was unthinkable, then I'd support foreign invasion and/or violent revolution. However, I do not.
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Even without these, you still have the excess mortality curves tracking Covid waves very closely, at least in 2020 and 2021, indicating that Covid was indeed heavily contributing to those excess deaths. And the disappearance of flu wasn't weird at all, the most basic anti-Covid protocols (wash your hands, keep your distance etc.) were exactly ones tailormade to combat flu, and they had very high rates of compliance at first. Of course it was going to take flu out as a side casualty, more effectively than Covid, which turned out to be a different case.
This explanation for the disappearance of flu is extremely naive. It disappeared in plenty of places without much adherence to those “basic protocols”.
The relation between those protocols and flu transmission is something extremely fuzzy, since we pretty much know at this point that this diseases are airborne and don’t really spread by touching some handrails, but by breathing the same air with an infected person. Hence the lack of any evidence of mass transmission in massive open air stadium events, while choirs and karaoke bars kept creating mass spreader events. Hence how social distancing quietly but surely went from literally keeping your distance to avoid a particle landing in your face, to meaning de facto indoor capacity limits.
The theory that regular flu strains disappeared due to being outcompeted by covid, and staged a comeback when enough people got covid and developed immunity, conforms much better to the real world patterns. Flu was gone for a much longer period of time than people actually giving a damn about the “basic protocols”.
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So we had the power to cure the flu this whole time and just didn't know it?
/s
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The relevant graph has an n of 8 (scroll to the last slide), not 12.
That said, it may be a representative graph of a single trial rather than actually being the only trial. Still, just an absolutely bonkers thing to approve for a not-mergency.
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