Links in bold.
Here is my journey from Covid alarmism to sanity. It is a reconstruction of what I wrote in August 2020 on my now-deactivated website.
Pardon the length. I want to get this all out there. I swear that this is how it went down. I’m not pulling any punches about my own gullibility and responsibility in the matter. Nor will I pull punches about my utter contempt towards the people who I think are responsible for the current social and political debacle.
Part I: Early alarm based on two key falsifiable propositions: no immunity in the herd, and if you’re infected, you’re sick, i.e., debilitated.
From late January to the end of May 2020, I was a Covid alarmist. This had zilch to do with the media. I don’t think the media were all that bad early on and in any case, I curate my information from a variety of sources, hardly any of which are the MSM.
Let’s remember correctly, as Hemingway said. In January 2020, the early Covid alarmists were on the hard right. The left was telling us that Covid alarmism was racism. The MSM was megaphoning the soft-left-liberal line: political exhortations to eat dinner in Chinatown. In retrospect, those politicians were right—but for the wrong reasons.
Confession: My Covid alarmism was a tribal affiliation with a small group of right-leaning dissidents who were cult followers of a maverick physicist-turned-anthropologist who shall be nameless (I will neither confirm nor deny.)
He’s brilliant but no one ever wants to disagree with him. I did once and was told to my (virtual) face that I was “full of shit.” So I ignored him for a while.
But when I heard about this new virus from China, I tuned back in because I knew he would be on the case and he’d cut through the bullshit.
He wrote: “It’s new. Nobody is immune.” I don’t know why — I just believed him. No, scratch that. I believed him because I wanted to. And that’s another, longer story for another day. Suffice it to say that I didn’t question the premise or its falsifiability.
Richard Feynman wrote to a student who reproduced an error in his thinking because he was Feynman: “I goofed, and you goofed for believing me.” I goofed for believing a guru because he’s brilliant in other ways. My bad.
At this point I became aware that a Nobel Laureate, Michael Levitt, disputed the interpretation of the statistics from the Diamond Princess. He said that Covid was self-limiting, invoking the Gomperz curve.
I once worked for a scientific membership organization some of whose members were Laureates. They are brilliant, but outside their area of expertise they were no smarter than the rest of us. I didn’t find Dr. Levitt’s projections remotely convincing. I thought Levitt was an idiot. In other words, I trusted the other guy but not Levitt.
I bleached my keys and lettuce, I obsessed over the stats from NYC’s Covid data page. I feverishly filled in a spreadsheet of deaths with projections for NYC, NY State, and the US. I watched every YouTube video of Dr. John Campbell and Medcram. I bought supplements. I obsessed about Bergamo.
The prospect of a morgue in Central Park filled me with terror.
In early April, a Navy ship for Covid patients docked on one of the west side piers to great fanfare. We were expecting thousands of bodies. This solidified my fear.
The Javits Center, a giant convention place in the west 30s, was readied for the overflow of patients.
April passed. I went out every day, but I still bleached my keys and lettuce.
The ship left town at the end of the month, having treated fewer than 200 patients. The Javits Center, which was supposed to have been a giant death camp, treated fewer than 500 people:
The Javits Center, which was initially envisioned as a 2,500-bed field hospital for non-COVID patients, converted to coronavirus-only hospital shortly after going operational. Still, the highest number of patients treated at the convention center at one time topped out at close to 500.
Central Park did not become a giant, open-air morgue.
By mid-May, deaths were in a steep downward curve as the Covid data page shows.
The weather was getting better. I had gone out every day during our lockdown, except when the weather was awful. Even during the worst of the sick-fear months of March to April 2020, every time I walked the empty streets and saw the shuttered shops, I questioned.
Many of the shops in my area were deemed “essential” so the semblance of normal life went on. Essential in NYC, includes pizza parlors, which never closed. Why? I wondered. If this virus was as bad as they say, wouldn’t pizza shops be closed? Why could Hispanic pizza parlor workers travel to the Upper West Side to serve patrons in a part of the city very lightly hit, when their neighborhoods were (supposedly) ravaged—if this killer virus was that bad?
In fact, what was the deal about “essential workers” anyway? If they (mostly black and brown) had to go to work, why not the rest of us?
If the virus was so easily caught, wasn’t having these potentially infected essential workers come to our pristine environs was a health hazard? What was more important, pizza or life?
Three months into the “pandemic” I was still unclear on how the hell you got this fucker. It’s all ridiculously clear now — it’s a respiratory virus, you get it the way you get other such viruses — but at the time it was shrouded in mystery. I began to slack off with Campbell and Medcram. (BTW, they are both great sources of general medical information and Campbell has since shown himself to be on the side of Covid reality.)
I stopped working on my morbid Excel charts.
One of my neighbors is Japanese. I was interested in how they seem to have coped with the virus better than the US. I sought out their now famous poster:
That little graphic taught me more than months of droning US government propaganda.
I recalled something I heard Bill Maher refer to in one of his short videos: that some people “get” the virus (that is, show antibodies, indicating exposure) but don’t get sick. No symptoms, nothing. They didn’t even know they’d been infected.
I couldn’t process this, and I continued to soak my lettuce in diluted Clorox.
I still wasn’t ready to give up my beliefs. But I couldn’t shake these facts. The upshot was, as is always the case when facts clash with beliefs, paralysis and discomfort.
It had occurred to me from the beginning that “the poison is the dose.” Was it possible that the principle of variolation could be pertinent to this infection, and that the truly sick were people who had been bombarded repeatedly with a high dose of the virus?
Early on, people noticed that this virus was hell on the aged. Kids, not so much. Instead of acknowledging that and making sound policy, people were shamed into silence. They were called “granny killers.” They were accused of privileging the young over the elderly—as if that’s a bad thing.1 I didn’t like this, but I kept my mouth shut.
I had a Twitter account at the time. One of the people I followed actually said that the death of a 90-year-old was as much of a tragedy as the death of a five-year-old. (A five-year-old with pre-existing health conditions had died with Covid.) I disagreed, but I held my tongue. I was part of a tribe.2
Part I key takeaway: the importance of asking questions and making uncomfortable observations and not being shamed into silence by group loyalty.
Part II: I Waking Up: the two propositions are falsified. There is immunity, and infection doesn’t mean “sick.”
I followed several new-minted celebrity virologists and epidemiologists, all people who became Big Names in the Church of St. Covid. When I’d ask a question, they didn’t like, I’d either be ignored or put down nastily because I’m not a blue check. I’m sorry I didn’t keep or screenshot of these tweets. My questions were valid and deserved a response. One of the worst, Carl Bergstrom3, blocked me. I was not unpleasant to him—I just asked a contrarian question.
I asked one Blue Checkista about variolation and was told that my idea was garbage. I forget who this creep was and I didn’t screen shot.
I also noted inconsistencies in data interpretation. Here, “per capita is per crapita.”
But a month later, per capita was a valid metric:
More. On May 23, per crapita adjustment wasn’t helpful:
Jumping ahead, in August 16, per capita magically became helpful4:
OK! It’s mid-May, I’m jumpy, I’m questioning, I see the Japanese poster—and don’t ask me what happened, but something in my brain cracked wide open. I distinctly remember waking up and saying to myself, “We can’t go on this way.” And then: “I’m not going to wear my mask outside. Inside, I’ll wear it, because it’s the law, and it might help. 5But not outside.”
Suddenly, the idea that a chance encounter with an infected person in the street would sicken me revealed itself as the nonsense it was.
I stopped wearing my mask outside. At first, I was scared. I never got over my hesitance and self-consciousness because my part of Manhattan is “Karen Central,” but I never gave in. I got only a few bad responses—not many, but enough to be disturbing and create a bad feeling.
One of these gray-haired overage hippie bitches snarled at me—while walking right next to unmasked outdoor diners. One crazy broad carried a six-foot stick in front of her horizontally (the idiot forgot that if she wanted six feet of space, she should have carried a twelve-foot pole) and grazed me with it. But that was the extent of it. Most people left me alone.
I noticed that on Twitter, the mask had become for many a tribal signal, a talisman of righteousness. That disgusted me even more. I wore a mask because I thought it helped, not because I wanted to be a part of some tribe and I took it off when I realized it was unnecessary. I changed my picture.
May 24. The death of George Floyd. Suddenly, the virus was an embarrassing complication that had to be finessed with high-class chicanery.
I’m not going to address the larger issues of the summer of 2020; they are not my concern here. I will simply note the utter betrayal I felt as almost the entire scientific establishment did a swift 180 and supported mass gatherings. They haven’t apologized for this. They never will.
At least, bitchface Rasmussen admitted that mass gatherings facilitate spread:
But of course, HER mass-gatherings are worth the risk, while OUR funerals and religious gatherings aren’t.
I’d like to ask Bitchface Angie who the fuck gave YOU the power to judge what my choices are?
This way for the gas, ladies & gentlemen!
NYC had “only” three nights of looting, and “only” in two areas (SoHo and Herald Square), but even so, I was shaken to my core.
[We’ll never know the truth about Washington Heights. I personally believe that there was a race war between the Dominican and black residents, which the Dominicans won, but this has been suppressed and you can only read scattered references to it outside the MSM .]
All throughout June, the entire NYC arts community collapsed before the great god BLM.
Back to Covid. I am, at this point, rapidly losing faith in everything about the Covidian narrative.
The coup de grace: in mid-June, we learned about Cuomo’s disastrous nursing-home policy.
Moreover, the nursing home could not test any such prospective residents — those treated for COVID-19 or those hospitalized for other reasons — to see if they were newly infected or perhaps still contagious despite their treatment. It was all laid out in a formal order, effective March 25. New York was the only state in the nation that barred testing of those being placed or returning to nursing homes.
In the weeks that followed the March 25 order, COVID-19 tore through New York state’s nursing facilities, killing more than 6,000 people — about 6% of its more than 100,000 nursing home residents.
I still can’t stop rapid eye-blinking when I read this. How can you call this anything other than premeditated murder? Not manslaughter. Murder. Of the helpless elderly.
The first place that this virus killed was in a Washington State nursing home! Did you have to be a public health specialist to know that the elderly were at special risk, and that closed quarters (remember that Japanese poster?) facilitated spread?
Did we just throw out one hundred years of epidemiology and do the exact OPPOSITE of what we were supposed to do?
I went back to Twitter and began to pay more attention to Dr. Francois Balloux, who has remained steadfastly fact-oriented and unsensationalist throughout this nightmare. Guess what, he mentioned the word “variolation.”
That was the idea I had had months before! Which was brutally rejected by one of the “experts.”
Throughout June 2020, the concept of asymptomatic infection kept nagging at me.
Finally, a thought burst out of the murk like a flame in the night: if you can be infected with SARS-CoV-2 and not know it, can you be infected with the flu virus and not know it?
I screwed up the courage to direct this tweet to… Dr. Michael Levitt himself! The idiot I had dismissed in February. Unfortunately, I can’t resurrect the deleted tweet but I did download its text:
Here's what I'd love to know. Honest, non-troll question, I swear it. We hear of ppl who test positive to SARS2 virus - with NO symptoms. None, nada, zilch. Does anyone test positive to flu virus with NO symptoms? No, because we don't test them, amirite?
Unlike the Covidians, who treated the slightest hint of contrarianness as heresy, Dr. Levitt answered my tweet even though I wasn’t a blue check with thousands of followers. I had asked a good question, and he respected that, and he answered me:
This is the acid test of a truly honest person: someone who listens to contrary opinions and doesn’t respond with insults and abuse.
For the record, I was just thought experimenting. I wasn’t implying. I had not come to any conclusions.
Then I came across this:
Over 75% of people with the flu do not have symptoms
During flu season, sufferers may marvel at those individuals who just never seem to get sick. But a new study suggests they may actually be ill without knowing it, as three quarters of people with seasonal and pandemic flu do not exhibit symptoms.
The researchers, led by Dr. Andrew Hayward of University College London in the UK, published the results of their study in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine.
They say about 1 in 5 people from the general population were infected in recent outbreaks of seasonal flu as well as the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. However, only 23% of these infections actually caused symptoms.
This was a mind-blower.
The more I looked into it, the more I saw that this is how viruses work.
Although polio can cause paralysis and death, the majority of people who are infected with the virus don't get sick and aren't aware they've been infected.
NOTE WELL: I am all in favor of vaccinating the public against polio. You do not want to be paralyzed at age 27 no matter how remote the probability.
So there is natural immunity.
Lots of people get infected and don’t even know it.
Some get sick and soon recover.
Only a small minority get sick, debilitated, and die.
What does “infected” mean, anyway? It just means that you’ve been exposed, your immune system kicks in, and one of the above-mentioned things happens. Right now, you may be “infected” with any number of viruses and you don’t know it. There is no point in testing for any of these. We swim in a sea of pathogens, overwhelmingly innocuous.
I was off the reservation, and I wasn’t about to join another one. I didn’t necessarily agree with everything on Team Reality, but I resolved never to pull punches for tribal solidarity.
Part III: Donald’s Trump’s Part: Tying It All Together.
(This was the one part of the blog I manage to download correctly so I’m leaving it as is. I wrote it on August 20th, 2022, so I’m leaving it in the present tense.)
Until now, I have avoided the subject of Donald Trump and his responsibility for the situation.
In a word: All of it. Donald Trump booted the response to the virus and that set the stage for the cascading series of horrors which we are now seeing unfold.
Trump has shown no leadership, has in fact disclaimed responsibility, and this in turn created the vacuum into which bad policies were enacted, mostly by Democratic governors. But the latter would never have done the things they did if the president had shown strong leadership.
The FDA and the CDC are under his direct authority. They are a part of the Executive branch of government. I don’t believe that the phrase “the buck stops here” is applicable to every little spat in a huge country, but it certainly applies to this. The thin-skinned reactions, the tweeting, the squabbling, subjecting himself to ridicule with those disastrous press conferences. He minimized, lied, stammered, stuttered, and let the situation slip out of his control. By the time of the George Floyd disorders, he had become completely marginalized.
Even in our leveling, anti-heroic times, a guy with the right personality could have stepped up to the plate and taken charge.
The Federal underreaction was matched by local overreaction.
The polarization about the virus is almost perfect, and again, I blame that on Trump. This will surely have disastrous consequences.
If he wins [the 2020 election], it’ll be because the Democrats have gone so crazy that voters prefer a vacuum to a poison gas.
To sum up, we can expect nothing but chaos and horror for the foreseeable future. It isn’t simply that we’re polarized. There is naked use of power but no legitimate authority. A huge mass of people have checked out. I used to be one of them. I know that I have no control over anything but the least I can do now is pay attention and record every receipt.
Throughout the entire ordeal of the past few years, the only thing that has given me solace is reading this, from Gone With the Wind:
Don’t be an Ashley Wilkes. And don’t let the Angie Rasmussens, the Eric Topols and the Carl Bergstroms push you around. They suck. They are power-mad maniacs, utterly illegitimate.
About political tribes—we all belong to one but choose wisely. Your tribe should be confident and healthy enough to survive constructive criticism. If it isn’t, get out.
And do you remember what happened, later, when vaccines became available? Old people were to be kicked to the back of the bus, because they were “too white.”
I’ll say it now: the death of a 90-year-old from a virus is no tragedy. It’s part of life. A 5-year-old, even a sick one? That’s a tragedy.
Bergstrom has pronouns in his Twitter bio. Hilariously, he’s written a book entitled Calling Bullshit. Why not? He’s an expert in it.
Topol later appeased the BLM idol with ritual recantations of his fields’ racism.
I’ve since come to reject that as well, but I’m being faithful to my responses at the time.)