A business show I was watching earlier today cut away to a commercial break. The cutaway music was Roller Coaster by the Ohio Players. I found the choice kind of timely, given the events we’re now living through. Our response to the current pandemic instantly comes to mind as the poster child for the ups and downs, twists and turns that a thrill ride represents. Only no one that I know of considers any of this all that thrilling. Well, almost no one.
Prior to the Coronavirus pandemic, President Trump was considered almost unbeatable by the media, his political allies, and opponents. There was an air of resignation on the part the political left that you could cut with a knife, and they were making no secret of it. Enter the virus and the necessity that we shut down our entire country to keep it from overwhelming our hospital systems. Various projections had our death toll in the millions initially, if nothing was done to “flatten the curve”. So, we shut down our schools, businesses, transportation, just about everything, in order to keep our health care systems from going off the rails.
Enter two local Bakersfield doctors, Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, who held a press conference questioning the lockdown orthodoxy being pushed by the technocrats and their touts in the media. For this affront, the local news station that posted the interview on their YouTube channel had it pulled for violating YouTube’s community standards. What were those standards? Well, according to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, since the video went against WHO policy, it needed to come down. Never mind the fact that both Stanford University and USC conducted similar studies that verified what these doctors were seeing from the testing data they were collecting. Mind you, this is the same WHO that carried China’s water during the early stages of the pandemic. Among other things they: parroted the lie that there was no human to human transmission of the virus, covered up the scope of infections in China, shut out Taiwan from any international assistance, and suppressed information coming from the Island nation on its virus findings.
I stated earlier that almost no one found any of this thrilling. So, who were the ones that did? The same folks who were resigned to a Trump win in 2020. This virus didn’t just hit the reset button for these folks, it flipped the script. The left and the legacy media now had a target to paint on the president’s back, the national response to this virus. It didn’t matter that China and the WHO conspired to keep the rest of the world in the dark until it was too late. It didn’t matter that we tanked our economy (as much of the world had, with the exception of Sweden) and put tens of millions of American workers on the unemployment rolls. It didn’t matter that politicians put our fates in the hands a bunch of technocrats who were only interested in achieving a specific set of results. None of that mattered at all. Like the rest of us, the administration was on the ropes when it came to figuring out the best way to deal with this unfolding disaster. Every miscue was magnified by the political opposition and the media. Not because the administration was really doing anything wrong, it just became a convenient cudgel to beat the president and his supporters over their heads with in order to score political points.
Speaking of WHO guidance, how come social distancing guidelines from the WHO state 3 feet or one meter and CDC guidance states 6 feet or two meters? Does twice as far mean twice as effective, or is there some other rationale at work here? What about masks? Well, according to the WHO, it’s a constantly morphing situation, but you wouldn’t know that based on fairly draconian requirements put forward by some state and local governments and the media’s constant drumbeat to both wear masks and social distance. Wasn’t it an “either or” proposition not too long ago? It seems as if the goalposts are constantly being moved, not to protect us from the virus, but to propagate a narrative.
Speaking of narratives, when protests against some of the lockdown measures started (Lansing, Michigan would be a good example), the media coverage of these protesters painted them as selfish insensitive people willing to kill grandma and grandpa because they couldn’t get a haircut or have their nails done. Forget about the fact that many small businesses were going under, or were about to. That didn’t matter. These people were breaking lockdown/quarantine edicts and needed to be publicly shamed. Enter the protests for racial justice that took place in the wake of the George Floyd killing. All of a sudden it became an imperative that anyone who felt the need to protest police brutality and systemic bias in our institutions be allowed to do so. In certain scientific circles, institutional racism was deemed a public health crisis almost as serious as the Coronavirus itself. One would think that there would be significant risk involved with bringing large groups of people together without any sort of social distancing (masks or no masks) over protracted periods of time. We’ll never know whether or not there was any sort of community spread of the virus due to these protests. Actions, like the decision made by New York City to not allow its contact tracers to ask COVID positive individuals if they participated in any of the civil rights protests, will make accurate collection of data all the more difficult.
Treatments for this virus range from antiviral medications intended to be used as prophylaxis, to vaccinations that in theory, should inoculate high risk individuals from the threat posed. One particular antiviral, Hydroxychloroquine, has been around for more than six decades. It was initially used as an anti-malarial drug, but later found success as a treatment for Lupus and Rheumatoid Arthritis. It was touted by the president as a possible treatment for the virus after conservative outlets ran articles or aired segments on its use in Europe, most notably France, as a bulwark against the virus. Suddenly, all manner of criticism was heaped on this yeoman of drugs. In fact, there was a study conducted that showed Hydroxychloroquine was dangerous to use as a treatment for the virus. That was all it took for the media to latch on to how bad the president’s choice of treatment was and that he was willing to send his fellow Americans to their deaths. That narrative was short lived however, when the study had to be retracted because of questionable methods used in the collection of the datasets. But that didn’t stop some media types like CNN’s Brianna Keilar from continuing to push the narrative, despite what the science showed, or rather didn’t show, in this case.
While we’re on the subject of media personalities, let’s talk about Dr. Anthony Fauci. As a member of the president’s COVID task force, he has been catapulted into the limelight as the face of the national response to the virus. The media has literally turned him into an icon of immunology. But as with any other personality, iconic or otherwise, he’s still human and prone to making judgement calls that may or may not be correct. As a business executive, the president surrounded himself with experts to ensure the success of his organization. They were there to advise him, but in the end, it was ultimately his decision as to what course his company took. As the chief executive of this country, he’s done something similar and uses his instincts, as well as his task force, to make decisions that affect the entire country. The fact that he decided to bring in another voice as a sanity check to the advice he’s been receiving, is exactly what you’d want to do. Dr. Scott Atlas is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute and is a former department head at Stanford University Hospital. Of course, this didn’t sit well with quite a few folks, given the good doctor’s stance on reopening our children’s schools. Again, I turn to our friend Ms. Keilar and her attacks on Dr. Atlas because of his appearances on conservative media sites and television shows.
What’s been sort of obvious from the start of this pandemic, is the fact that there have been far too many alarmists who would rather sow fear and discord, than cast a critical eye towards what happened, what’s being done now, and what needs to happen going forward. Of course, this could have been predicted since our current condition is all the fault of the president. He made light of this pandemic and failed to protect us. He’s more interested in opening up the economy than he is in combating this virus. All one needs to do is to find a negative descriptor about what’s been happening in this country and then hang it around his neck like an albatross to sink his candidacy. The truth, the facts, and reality should have no place in politics. They only serve to “muddy” the waters and complicate an already difficult situation. If you like folks blowing smoke up your gym shorts and telling you it’s sunshine, then you’ll feel right at home with all of the above. If not, then it’s time to wave the BS flag and start doing some “grupsplainin” (grown-ups explaining things) to these nice people, since all they’ve done is come amongst us to trade on our ignorance, fear, and misery. Or at least they hope.
