Why Didn't You Fall For The Scamdemic

When the world went crazy in March 2020 with drastic lockdowns and sundry ‘social distancing’ stupidities, it was with stunned amazement that I watched the snowballing Covid hysteria and prairie-fire panic that gripped both elite and popular levels of society in a seeming instant.  That month was the start of a surreal nightmare, one that held the vast bulk of the population in its sway for over two years.

So, why was I one of the apparently very few who could see the sheer absurdity of sidewalk swerving and the magic six feet of separation (“six feet safe; five feet danger!”), the ludicrous patrols of cafes by police with tape measure in hand and the ‘caution tape’ that roped off children’s playgrounds, the ludicrous orders to only leave home once a day and then not to travel more than a specified distance from it, the outlawing of the handshake and its replacement with the asinine elbow-bump?  What was it about those people, like myself, who could not, and would not, comply with any of this nonsense?

1.        Not buying the fear

Behind all the wacky, neurotic, virus-avoidance behaviour and policy stupidity, of course, was fear, the staggeringly omnipresent fear of the Worst Disease Ever1 that was the primer for the mass psychosis that manifested itself through well-known psychological mechanisms (obedience to authority, social conformity, etc.) that were no longer the subject of dispassionate academic pondering but were now operating, at scale, right in the daily lives of our fellow citizens.

It was all so sudden.  Before Covid mania had fully set in, even the political and health authorities had been urging caution because most people who would get Covid would either have zero or only mild symptoms.  Then, however, they all took a synchronised dive off the deep end.  Corporate and state media, politicians, medical bureaucrats, academic modellers, public health ‘experts’ and other fear-mongering virus seers stirred the pot of hysteria with exaggerated prophecies of viral devastation that could only allegedly be prevented through unprecedented, draconian restrictions on human activity.

Unlike the vast majority of people, who behaved as do children after having watched a scary movie and then cower in bed with the covers pulled up over their heads hoping the Boogey Man will not get them, I was never afraid of the virus.  I never felt the concocted fear and never bought into the orchestrated panic.  What we were being told to dread – a super-contagious virus that was felling its victims like nine-pins, sometimes literally as they were walking down a Chinese city street, healthy one instant and dead the next - didn’t match with personal experience.  If this virus was so portentous, why wasn’t anyone I knew dying, or even ‘getting’ Covid, whatever ‘Covid’ really is (and it was never clear from the smorgasbord of symptoms how Covid was any different from the common cold and the flu)?

Weren’t all the people said to be dying from this virus in Italy and Spain, the early European panic hubs, exclusively very old, carrying serious comorbidity baggage and often residents of nursing homes where something innocuous to healthy people could prove fatal to them?  Isn’t that the profile of those who usually fare poorly, mortality-wise, from a virus?  Don’t the rest of us have brilliant immune systems, honed by aeons of evolution, for a reason?

I remember the Diamond Princess, the cruise-ship of doom, a classic petri-dish for virus spread, as a crucial Covid myth-busting event.  Impounded in late February/early March, 2020, to dramatic, round-the-clock, scare-headlines, of its 3,711 (mostly elderly) passengers and crew, barely 18% (696 of them) got the ‘highly contagious’ virus (i.e. tested positive for Covid, whatever that dodgy PCR metric actually means) and only 40% of these actually had any symptoms at all.  Most of those who were actually a bit crook (only 8% of all on board) were only mildly symptomatic.  A grand total of only seven passengers (all over 70 years old) eventually died, not ‘from Covid’ but from ill-advised ventilator use in on-shore hospital ICUs.

For those who chose to look, Covid early on conformed to long-established folk-wisdom about viruses.  For generations, seasonal, infectious, respiratory diseases had been handled calmly, if resignedly, by maintaining all social and economic functioning, whilst the genuinely vulnerable, the immuno-compromised, were free to do, or not to do, what worked for them to minimise their exposure whilst awaiting the natural virus cycle endpoint of blessed summer and/or infection-acquired herd immunity courtesy of the healthy.

Pre-Covid, the regular winter advent of virus season was treated as a medical and not a political matter but what I saw with the early days of Covid, on the other hand, was the beginnings of the panicked opposite – a momentous, and ominous, political sickness arising from a totally futile plan to manage a none-too-special virus by destroying liberty.  As the wickedly witty Rudolph Rigger puts it in his wonderful Substack, with Covid we suddenly decided that “the absolute best response to a virus for which the median age of death was higher than median life expectancy was to shut down the entire planet. And to stop us from sitting on park benches”. 

Just as I simply wasn’t buying what the authorities and media were selling about the virus itself, I also wasn’t about to subscribe to any part of the dangerously dumb response to it.  I also decided to finally pull the plug on the virus-obsessed ABC (I had blown off the corporate media ages ago).  Increasingly disillusioned with the state media arm over a number of years for its fixation on whatever the woke cause de jour is and for its unhinged hatred of Brexit and Trump (or, more accurately, the working class who saw their interests embodied in them), it was when the ABC became a tiresome Covid propaganda service with ‘news’ of ‘cases’ saturating its airwaves and febrle ‘analysis’ by the Covid-kooky Dr Norman Swan, that I abandoned it, for good this time.

This would prove to be my greatest defence against being sucked into the ‘Covid’ vortex.  Not so, alas, for the 61% of Australian adults who get all their news, every skerrick of it, from the TV.  The majority of TV-addicted Australians were thus the perfect propaganda-fodder for an emotionally-manipulative, image-driven, superficial sound-bite approach to the Covid ‘news’ (fear of a virus, love of the lockdown and joy over the jab). No wonder there were so many Covid Crazies about in Australia.

2.        Discovering a counter-narrative

The official Covid campaign of fear and panic, and the willingness of nearly everyone to go along with it all, left me with a soup of negative emotions – bewilderment, shock, frustration, sadness, anger - but there was also a very early resolve that I would never test, never mask (except when absolutely necessary and then as incorrectly as possible), never roll up my sleeve for a dangerous junk injectable (the latter decision, admittedly, made somewhat easier because I enjoyed the luxury of retirement and no longer had any job that could be threatened).

Was I, however, Robinson Crusoe on this?  At the very early stages of the scamdemic, it was mainly intuition and instinct that told me that the official line on the virus was just terribly wrong and idiotic but was there a coherent, objective counter-narrative that could validate my subjective position?

For those who chose to look, there were many early warnings about the looming policy catastrophe being mulled over in response to exaggerated fear of the virus.  The Brownstone Institute, a free-market and politically libertarian organisation with considerable intellectual heft and a cast of contributors from various political persuasions all united by a liking for truth-telling, has compiled a few dozen of the more prominent of these, including the WHO itself, so boringly orthodox was the pre-Covid consensus on viruses and their management which specifically recommended against economic lockdowns, school closures, border closures, mask mandates and which dampened down expectations of a successful coronavirus vaccine.

Once the panic ramped up, however, such voices of reason and calm were silenced by the surround-sound hubbub of the pandemicists and Covid maniacs.  It was only through my guilty pleasure (I still regarded myself politically as of the Left) of reading certain conservative writers who had valuable things to say on the pathologies of Trump Derangement Syndrome and Woke Derangement Syndrome that I also found some truly informed and articulate voices against Covid Derangement Syndrome.

The British Tory, Toby Young, was the first of this stable of writers which grew to include many other professional scribblers and scientific/medical practitioners.  It further expanded to include many ‘anti-vaxxers’ whom I gradually came to see in an increasingly positive light (ah, the dangers of keeping an open mind!).  Thus has Covid overreach come back to bite the ‘public health’ orthodoxy on all vaccines squarely in the bum - the journal Pediatrics, for example, reports that the proportion of US parents who agree that [any] vaccines are “associated with illness or death” almost doubled from 18.3% to 31.5%.

This pool of voices arguing against the Covid policy disaster was the ‘pull’ factor for me.  This was complemented by the ‘push’ factor of every subsequent doolally development in the ‘social distancing’ charade, the masking and testing rigmarole, the fineable mandates and the vaxxing schemozzle.  None of this Covid ‘mitigation’ farrago had anything to do with health or science (as they used to be understood) and everything to do with enforcing a political narrative (deadly virus needs drastic response) through obedience to the state, demonising dissent, censoring alternative views and shrouding government decision-making in secrecy.

As a study in psyops, Covid was a real corker.  Everything, from the bogus and inflated Covid ‘case’ and Covid ‘death’ counts, the lockdown lies, the mask mania, the useless but deadly ‘vaccines’, the dalliance with quasi-martial law and undemocratic rule by technocrats, was, right from the start, part of a nefarious psychological warfare ploy to get public buy-in to a political strategy to show that our ‘caring’ governments were ‘doing something’ rather than ‘letting it rip’.

The ‘doing something’ list grew at terrifying pace.  The growing ‘what-fresh-hell-is-this’ list of political interventions including travel restrictions, business and school closings, legal segregation and employment purges based on vaccination status, restricting access to healthcare and the closing down of dentistry, the ritual humiliation and political persecution of the unvaxxed Novak Djokovic by the lamentable PM, Scott Morrison, and ‘free money’ fantasies of state welfare funding of almost the entire economy with its pump-priming of massive debt, stratospheric interest rates and vigorous inflation.  Staggering stupidity upon staggering stupidity which achieved only the illusion of virus control at enormous social cost.

The emerging ‘public health’ tyranny also increasingly relied on the moral guilt-tripping of Covid rebels as selfish, anti-science deviants.  The ugly desperation of the Covid policy architects and all those otherwise normal people caught up in the pandemic melodrama arose from the fact that they all had closed minds, were unwilling to admit to harmful error and were unwilling to engage in dialogue or anything resembling civil discourse.

Those still clinging to The Mask, still longing for the latest booster and even pining after lockdown have truly had their minds broken – they will, perhaps, never see that their fear of the virus was utterly irrational and their faith in public health ‘experts’ and Big Pharma dangerously misplaced.  There are a lot of these people about, alas – late last year, Pew Research polled Americans on “what gives them meaning in life” and one in twenty people, at least one-fifth of the population, responded that COVID gave their life meaning.  How demoralising and sad is that.

This was the dark underbelly of totalitarian excess that really shocked me - the frightening inability or unwillingness (I haven’t decided yet) of the large majority of the population to think for themselves (one of the enduring pieces of loving advice my mother gave to me as a child whenever I had done something foolish was ‘God gave you a brain, use it’), coupled with the delusion that governments and ‘Experts’ and ‘Science’ can keep us safe from every threat in life, big and little. 

The government’s assurance that all the daft nonsense they were doing was in order to “Keep everyone safe” was patently ludicrous because practically everyone was safe from a very average virus.  It was, however, the implied rider - “Stay Safe - and that’s an order!” - which really got my goat.  Personal risk assessment is my right, and my responsibility, and no government should be able to dictate personal behaviour for any claimed benefit of ‘public health’ safety, whether the actual viral threat is serious or a whole lot of nothingburger.  The Covid madness was authoritarian political poison and, right from the start of the madness, I knew inside my head, and felt in my bones, that I was never going to have a bar of it.

3. So, why did all the Covid hysteria pass me by?

Was it demographics?

I’ve had the flu a few times in my life and I get the occasional common cold coronavirus but, classic baby boomer that I am (born smack dab in the middle of the 1946-1964 post-war baby boom and now so ancient that I can remember a Time Before TV), I come from a generation that took viruses, and illnesses generally (I had Scarlet Fever as a nipper and that was a real doozy) in their stride, accepting them ruefully as part of your lot in life.  Remember the chicken pox parties organised by the parents of the Baby Boomers so that every kid could get this mild condition over and done with?  Virus parties for the young ‘uns, however, would be inconceivable in this Covid day and age with its now-entrenched fetish for childhood vaccination.

As a rule, however, my Boomer peers were amongst those most terrified of Covid and were often the most fanatical of the restrictionists and vaccinators.  They didn’t lack for company, of course, including the very old, who had survived not only viruses but wars and economic depression but who meekly surrendered to a virus, as did those statistically least at risk from Covid, the young.  Age-wise, there was an Olympic race to the bottom to see who could be the most frightened of Covid, the most obedient to their Covid jailers and the most censorious of the Covid deviants.

Was it politics?

If demographics doesn’t hold the clue to who will be a Covid conformist or dissident, then perhaps politics can.  After all, surveys in the US have consistently show that ‘liberals’ (i.e. Democrat voters, ‘progressives’, the ‘woke’)  have been more hot for Covid restrictions than their opposite numbers (Republican voters).  In January 2022, for example, the Rasmussen polling organisation found that a whopping 59% of Democrat voters would favour a government policy requiring the unvaxxed to “remain confined to their homes at all times, except for emergencies” (by contrast, a more reassuring 79% of Republicans thought this beyond the pale).  Almost half (48%) of Democrat voters thought governments should be able to fine or imprison individuals who “publicly question the efficacy of the existing Covid vaccines” (compared to just 14% of Republicans).  Almost half (47%) of Democrat voters think the government should be able to put a “tracking system, like an ankle monitor or a locked collar, on people who refuse the vaccine” (only 14% of Republican voters thought so).  Deaf to historical precedent, 45% of Democrats would favour governments compelling unvaxxed citizens to live in “designated facilities or locations” until they bare their shoulder (78% of Republicans would strongly oppose this historically sinister ‘camps’ mindset).

Australian surveys (for example Essential polls) also reveal a similar political divide on Covid Downunder, although the margins between Labor and Liberal voters are much narrower which is not too surprising considering how nutty all of Australia went in its early fatuous quest for the fantasy of Zero Covid but the ‘Left’ were generally more zealous for Covid restrictions and vaxx compulsion.

Wither the Left?

The Covid Left’s support for medical tyranny was a shock to me, a four-decade leftwing political activist and trade union rep whose default setting is that our governments always lie, the big media always lie and that ‘follow the money’ is a much better guide than ‘follow The Science’, particularly when Big Pharma is in the game.  Yet, almost all of the contemporary Left, negating their entire political value system, were as mesmerized by the Covid shenanigans as any other political tendency.

To me, an old lefty, on the other hand, Covid was just the latest, and blatant, incarnation of the disgraceful Iraq War and the fabled Weapons of Mass Destruction hokum all over again.  The Covid war, like the Iraq (and Vietnam and any other imperialist war you care to name) was another giant con, based on propaganda in aid of a political agenda that threatened immense harm.  Yet the Covid Left, which had seen through the Iraq WMD nonsense, swallowed the Covid Weapons of Mass Deception whole, and eagerly lined up for second, and third, and more helpings (more lockdown, masks, testing, vaxxes, please).

The contemporary Left’s ‘Covid’ performance accelerated the process of the Left leaving me.  I didn’t leave the ‘Left’ (I have retained my old leftwing principles and vision) – it was the Covid ‘Left’ which left me.  It was a reverse case of the “it’s not you its me” relationship breakup because it was the contemporary Covid ‘Left’ which had revealed it new values in support of state tyranny, censorship and big corporate medicine.  This breakup was the culmination of some six years of the modern Left turning on its working class constituency through Brexit Derangement Syndrome, Trump Derangement Syndrome and the ‘everything is about race’ and other obsessions of woke identity politics upon which the modern Left has become almost monomaniacally fixated.

Even now, with the worst excesses of Covid policy abating (other than the slow-motion disaster of the jabs, of course), the modern Left has not corrected its Covid course and has not engaged in any critical self-reflection on its own role as political quislings in the capitalist state’s rule by fear and force.  Post-Covid, with mortality up, fertility down, economies fractured, education ruined, child development stunted – if any of these sequelae are even noticed, they are treated as mysteries or simply attributed to the virus and never to the illusory, futile and damaging measures taken against it.  Blissful ignorance can be so comforting.

‘Which side are you on’, we on the (old) Left used to sing about the big labour movement struggles of the past.  Waving their ‘Covid forever!’ placards, however, the new ‘Left’, have crossed the figurative picket line and are openly on side with the new ‘public health’ rulers and Big Pharma bosses now.  The Covid Left now portrays freedom as nothing but a right-wing trope.  Hello!? - if the modern Left doesn’t stand for freedom, what is the point of it as a political movement?

The modern Left’s gross failure on Covid does not mean that the political right were always right on Covid, however.  Although it was the Right, particularly its more libertarian tendencies, that made the early running against the Covid craziness, stealing the Left’s clothes in the political cross-dressing process, much of the Right was in on the Great Covid Scam, too.  Politics, as traditionally framed, hasn’t proved to have much predictive power of who fell for tyranny and who rejected it.

‘Covid’ - A Test of Character

Covid was a test of character and far too many, from all points of the demographic and political compass, failed it.  Too many (the Covid conformists and enablers) were easily and irrationally frightened into sacrificing their civil rights and personal freedoms, their human community and social connection, by seeking a world safe from viruses.  The Covid rebels, on the other hand, accepted that life involves risks, including viruses, which can not be expunged by craven obedience to the state and to a technocratic caste in a futile quest for safety at all costs, including the cost of freedom – bodily, intellectual and human.

Those who viewed freedom as a dispensable luxury in the age of Covid are also much more likely to throw freedom under the bus to protect them from the ‘perils’ of free speech, ‘misinformation’, ‘offence’ and Wrongthinkers like the Evil Orange Man who ‘threatens our democracy’.

Freedom of thought, speech, movement and association, bodily freedom, the freedom to breathe unrestricted by a filthy mouth gag – Covid revealed a fundamental demarcation between those who opposed, and those who defended, these freedoms.  For the first time in generations, and in highly intimate ways, entire populations of the West saw their fundamental freedoms all disappear in a puff of ‘public health emergency’ smoke.

Too many fell for this cheap conjuror’s Covid trick, forgetting all they should have learned from a long history of political trickery (WMDs, wars to ‘defend freedom and democracy’, Cold War McCarthyism, the ‘trickle down theory’ of tax cuts for the rich, etc., etc.).  Only the truly sceptical or cynical, and those who paid much closer attention to history than to the idiot box in the corner of the room, saw through the hocus pocus of ‘Covid’.

Footnote 1

(The ‘Worst Disease Ever’ phrase borrowed from Bloovis, recommended reading for those who like their Covid commentary with lashings of sarcasm).

Oh, and artwork at the top of this post is by Jordan Henderson.

Your turn

I’ve been very self-indulgent with my personal reflections on the making of a Covid dissident, so I would really love your input in the Comments below on what it was about you that made you a Covid rebel.  It is vital to know what personal characteristics and value systems proved resistant to the Great Covid Derangement because human history is, unfortunately, well-acquainted with dangerous mass stupidities and we need to know what it will take to foil future ones and to cultivate those values.  Our freedom depends on it.

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Thanks for being with me for another year of Covid follies downunder and I hope to see you in the new one because there will, alas, be another year of it because Covid mania is the gift that keeps on giving.

And don’t forget to do the poll below: