Who Didn't Listen?

Back to the article, which I am not going to get into too deeply, but it has some interesting lines I will take out of it, like:

Previously anticipated negative effects now borne out in the scientific literature

"Previously anticipated" - but not by this News Corp service. They were part of the team pushing for vaccinations, justifying lockdowns and vilifying the unvaccinated, picking private citizens out and publicly shaming them. Oh, and those negative effects include:

a rise in non-Covid excess mortality, mental health deterioration, child abuse and domestic violence, widening global inequality, food insecurity, lost educational opportunities, unhealthy lifestyle behaviors, social polarization, soaring debt, democratic backsliding and declining human rights.

I have written about many of those here over the last couple years.

The social ramifications of Covid-19 are huge, and it isn't because people who had already lived longer than the average lifespan in their countries were dying, but because there is a division in the way people were treated. Reality of health and quality of information didn't matter, it became a moral argument.

“Studies on media representations from Canada and the UK found a strong moralization discourse that blamed and shamed specific groups (e.g. Asians, young people, nonconforming individuals) and divided the population into – ‘the virtuous’ rule followers (considered selfless and smart) and the deviants (e.g. Covidiots; immoral, stupid and selfish), who questioned or criticized the NPI rules and/or did not respect the rules,”

Note: I am one of the immoral unvaccinated.

And then, there was the "public discourse" which was decidedly, lopsided in one direction.

“Increases in media use were associated with a decline in mental health. Studies generally show that political sources dominated the crisis reporting, revealing the central influence of the state and biomedical experts in constructing pandemic news, with some indication that critical scrutiny of policy decisions were minimal.”

And how many of us bought in? Invested ourselves into amplifying the message that we were being pushed continuously through every channel, even though many of the measures made no logical sense and offered no practical protection? Many, many. Did you download a tracing app? Did you think bad thoughts about a person you saw at the shops without a mask on? Were you on your moral high horse, like religious fanatic, willing to convert the unvaccinated heathens? Did you believe that unvaccinated people shouldn't get healthcare until vaccinated? Did you feel that you were unsafe around unvaccinated people, that they were risking your life?

“This should support a higher level of healthy skepticism about simplistic narratives and technocratic governance that aim for unrealistic goals presented to the public as urgent moral imperatives.”

Are you a skeptic yet?

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana

The evidence is there now and a lot of it was there before, too. And, a lot of it was predictable and was predicted, by people who are far smarter than I, but they were ridiculed, cancelled and had their reputations destroyed, even though they were the preeminent experts on the topics at hand - all because they didn't support the media narrative, one driven by governments and pharmaceutical companies - not data and logic.

The fact is, we didn't do the best we could with the information we had, because there was plenty of information that was available before and came out during that should have changed our course - but it didn't.

We are condemned to repeat it.

Again and again and again.

What is predictable is, human response to fear. I know for me who chose not to get vaccinated, even though there was a lot of pressure to do so and I was being ridiculed by friends and family disapproved. I was still fearful. I still questioned myself as to whether I was right or wrong, but I chose to do my own research and also apply my own logic. I chose to pay the social consequences, by following the data, instead of bowing to peer pressure. I know I could have been wrong, but I was willing to die on the back of my own logic, rather than die on the back of government directives. I put no one at risk, but myself.

I would look at those Covid statistics and death rates near daily, but I wouldn't get hung up on the deaths, I would look at who is dying.

Yet, as predicted the ramifications of our behaviors are going to have negative impacts on me and the entire global population, because we are all at the mercy of the masses. The people who are going to suffer the most are those who were already suffering and those who will suffer the least, are the ones who drove the narrative from the beginning - the same group who also benefited the most from the situation - and are still benefiting.

We all make decisions and we must all live with the consequences, even if we aren't the ones making the decisions that affect us the most.

The good that should come out of the Covid pandemic isn't that we shouldn't listen to the media, but the media in its current form is untrustworthy. We need to develop better ways to build trusted information and distribute it effectively, without it being hijacked by governments and corporations to meet their own needs, over our wellbeing. We need to hold the governments accountable for their decisions, not by voting in new politicians, but by overhauling governance completely and ensuring that the level of collusion we are seeing happen that is not in our best interest as a society, is impossible. We need to definitely develop better checks and balances for corporations and improve their accountability and responsibility too, so that the punishment for cheating is greater than the incentive to cheat, and the chance of getting caught is much higher.

We are still going to suffer due to increasingly poor health and economic tragedy for decades to come, but we need to start learning from the past and developing better ways of working, together, and as individuals.

"Nobody is safe"

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]