COVID control ignorance — a Capitalist exercise in profits-extraction and public control?

02 February 2021

Living through American COVID, for the past year . . .

. . . should have persuaded us all that American Government and its national security apparatus are much worse than expensively useless.

In that regard, I have previously drawn repeated attention to the United States' determination not to investigate SARS-CoV-2's epidemiology, effective control measures, or the harmful cost to benefit ratio of the often damaging things that we have done in response to COVID-19's spread.

Power-grabbing leadership's vacuity . . .

. . . seems to characterize most of what has happened

Recall (in this estimation) that this waffle-headed COVID "program" was not all former President Trump's fault.

In fact, the one good thing that is finally beginning to manifest — namely Operation Warp Speed's vaccine development — can be credited to him. At least, to the same degree that we attach a Top Dog's name to whatever "stuff" happened during his and her reigns.

Consider an insightfully mundane paragraph . . .

. . . from the astute Peter Van Buren.

He wrote that:

Most people around here [New York City] do wear their masks, but even there it makes no sense.

You’ll see “masks” made by stretching a T-shirt over one’s nose, along with fresh surgical masks and stained paper ones.

Some masks fit well; most have gaps on the sides where impure air is exhaled; some have valves to spew out unfiltered breaths.

Placing all efforts in making people wear something symbolic, like an old soiled mask, and little to no effort in enforcing the efficiency of those masks (such as handing out clean ones everywhere), is the appearance of action without action, 9/11 security theater.

Politics.

Ask the obvious

Van Buren is harping upon the same issue that I have all year.

If masks are so important, why has American Government made no effort (at all) to manufacture and distribute effective masks into the American public's hands?

Hmmm?

Similarly

As a nation, we have made no soundly reasoned effort to take investigative advantage of the variety of epidemiological experiments that the public has been conducting upon itself at no charge:

For example, the predominantly no-mask Sturgis motorcycle rally last summer.

Or the continuing wide variety of differing reactions to local and regional government mandates (and not) to COVID's virally happy gallivant around the country.

The data is right there. Provided that anyone in lackadaisical government (at any level) had actually wanted to track and trace consequences.

However, where societally conscious brains still do exist . . .

A group at Stanford University did what any sensible people would do.

And their comparative study — of anti-COVID public health measures taken across 10 nations — resulted in the following statement:

[W]e fail to find strong evidence supporting a role for more restrictive [non-pharmaceutical interventions] NPIs in the control of COVID in early 2020.

We do not question the role of all public health interventions, or of coordinated communications about the epidemic, but we fail to find an additional benefit of stay- at- home orders and business closures.

The data cannot fully exclude the possibility of some benefits. However, even if they exist, these benefits may not match the numerous harms of these aggressive measures.

More targeted public health in-terventions that more effectively reduce transmissions may be important for future epidemic control without the harms of highly restrictive measures.

© 2020 Eran Bendavid, Christophe Oh, Jay Bhattacharya and John P. A. Ioannidis, Assessing mandatory stay-at-home and business closure effects on the spread of COVID- 19, European Journal of Clinical Investigation, 2021;00:e13484, https://doi.org/10.1111/eci.13484 (24 December 2020)

Have you seen mentions . . .

. . . from lamestream, big tech, big business — or the US Government — that the above study exists?

Nope.

They suppressed it.

What am I driving at?

One does not need conspiring "conspirators" to hatch the de facto equivalent of a Loot the Masses plot.

An entrenched pattern of disregarding lives in favor of profit — combined with Rabble-control measures (just because) — is all that it takes.

Quoting Van Buren again:

The success of the MSM [mainstream media] in politicizing debate, as they did with the Iraq war when basic questions were seen as disloyal, has meant that we’ve proceeded into the darkness without science’s light.

Why do we care so much about bullying people in stores and not about doing the things that without question save lives?

[U]nder-reaction to the vaccine seems just as dangerous as the virus itself.

It’s almost as if the politicians don’t really want COVID to end.

Making people afraid is how governments grow their power; frightened people usually demand that someone exert more control over them.

Rules that make little sense grossly enforced by bullies are great training for more authoritarianism.

That may well be COVID’s legacy.

The moral? — What is easiest and most profitable . . .

. . . for The Wealthy Few is what always happens in the United States.

American Government works exclusively for the Corporatist Oligarchy, not you.

Fearmongering, leech-like extraction and public control are their trades.

If we think otherwise, after COVID's obvious and painful lessons, we have not been doing our self-preservation homework.

PeteFree.com

COVID control ignorance — a Capitalist exercise in profits-extraction and public control?