We were fed what now looks like a pack of lies.
Videos from China and then Italy showed terrifying scenes, hospitals overrun and large numbers dying - obviously people were going to be scared. In those early days the death rate looked far worse than the low rate it settled at - I don’t know if those figures were embellished, but our government, after apparently fannying about and talking in slogans and not doing anything decisive, finally decided on lockdown, which I remember many feeling was a relief, they were finally doing something. Reports from Asian countries looked like their strict pandemic policies were working, so it made sense that something similar here would be helpful.
I’m not sure at what point it became clear that covid wasn’t the danger that we were told it was, and to be fair to non-scientists (ie most of us), and questioning and googling we might do led to a variety of inconsistencies - take masks - there were plenty of research papers to be found proving that wearing masks was useful - research carried out in 2020 using cages of hamsters apparently showed masks to be effective in the spread of covid, whilst other papers proved beyond doubt that masks didn’t work for flu. Now a Cochrane review points out masks are useless, with a caveat that with low compliancy the results aren’t definitive, but still enough to say that there’s no point wearing masks any more (yet we’re still made to in hospitals and drs surgeries).
The Great Barrington Declaration was seen as a breath of fresh air by some, but at the same time, with the available information at the time, it had glaring gaps, ignoring the reported numbers of patients needing hospital care and even ICU care - at that time there was so much conflicting information that without the benefit of hindsight it would have been irresponsible to put it into action.
Unfortunately at the time the died from/died with was confusing and difficult to follow, and dissenting voices from anti covid people were very often easily ignored because other stuff claimed was plain wrong (masks causing lack of oxygen, masks causing a rise in bacterial lung infections), and making claims that there was no such thing as covid, when at times excess deaths were alarmingly high, even if the main deaths were amongst the elderly.
People were scared, and when faced with a scenario that we’ve been warned about for years were ready to trust our government to keep us safe. It took time for the information to be gathered about covid, and instead of being honest, the government used it against us, all of us. In the meantime, those speaking out against it all were discredited for their views, posts here were deleted left right and centre.
In light of Matt Hancock’s latest message about scaring the pants off us with another variant, well, it worked. We largely complied with every lockdown. That doesn’t make people stupid though.
If nothing else all of this should teach us that as humans we are all different, but sadly the main thing it’s taught many of us is that we cannot trust our government, or other parties who went along with the hysteria. They were the people with access to objective information.
Dr John Campbell, a retired nurse on YouTube put in a great amount of effort to keep people up to date with information, translating documents from scientific language to plain English so viewers could understand what was going on. Many MNers recommended watching him as a no nonsense, balanced source of info. Until he started spotting inconsistencies and questioning things, at which point he was promptly discredited, anyone quoting him or sharing videos were told “he’s not even a dr” “he’s sold out”, and any links were deleted. If I’m to understand that now I can say he was right in some aspects now certain details have come to light, I’m going to suspect that his changed opinion on vaccines (along with many other credible drs) may have a grain of truth in them. I am fully vaccinated to this point, I say I made the choice freely, but in truth I probably didn’t, the fear and manipulation likely swayed it, but I won’t have any more, because my trust in anyone over this whole mess is gone.
Russell Brand (yes I know he’s a dick) made a video recently showing how much money Bill Gates has made through covid. Has the whole thing been manipulated to make wealthy people wealthier? I’d like to say no, but I don’t believe that any more. Politicians are out for themselves, they don’t give a shit about ordinary people.
Humans are all different, we all react differently to things, I’m sure if we our covid “behaviour” we’re plotted on a graph it would end up a bell curve, with one extreme still wearing masks and washing their shopping, and the other extreme calling for compliant hospital drs to face Nurembergesque trial. If nothing else it’s an interesting observation of humans. Whilst the pro-covid side (for want of a better way to describe it) went along with the fear and shut down other opinions using the sources they trusted, the anti-covid side were doing the same thing with their trusted sources - as it turns out both sides’ sources had elements of truth and lies. Maybe from here, as a population who now knows our government is a pit of despair, maybe we should be trying to be more open minded to each other, to hearing other views, to not fall into this damaging polarisation that happens with pretty much every issue now.
And maybe we should all be marching in the streets to get rid of this shitshow of a government, and demand changes be made to politics, which appears to be broken.