Covid Worsened America Rage Virus, for Which There’s No Vaccine Critics of the pandemic response were silenced, permanently damaging trust in institutions. By Daniel Lee
EXCERPTS
Three years ago, I was in St. Pete Beach, Fla., as the reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic was accelerating. On Monday I waited an hour for a seat in Skidder’s Restaurant. Then Gov. Ron DeSantis closed bars and limited restaurants to 50% capacity. By Wednesday evening, I had the back porch of the Wharf Restaurant to myself, my only company a seagull perched on a piling, eyeing my fried oysters.
On the drive back to Indiana I found exit-ramp restaurants closed to dine-in patrons. Families had to eat grumpily in their minivans. At home the usually bustling Greenwood Park Mall parking lot was empty. Some employees received “essential workers” letters from their companies allowing them to go to their jobs, but thousands of presumably inessential employees found their incomes drying up.
As horrific as Covid-19 was as a physical illness, it was even worse as a social pathogen. The virus leapt from the body to the body politic. People were arrested for exercising in public, holding church services and refusing to wear masks. Others lost jobs for refusing the vaccine. Confrontations between maskers and antimaskers went viral. Schools were closed, damaging kids’ development. In Canada nearly two years into the pandemic, the government froze the bank accounts of people daring to demonstrate against its Covid-abatement efforts.
Vaccine mandates poured gasoline on the smoldering distrust of media outlets and science that had seemed rife with political ideology even before the outbreak. The mandates provoked resistance to even common-sense disease-limiting practices.
And the disease was quickly politicized. Progressives found an opportunity to expand government management of health—by force if necessary. For conservatives this seemed to prove they were right to distrust activist government. Donald Trump was encouraging ingestion of horse dewormer and household cleansers. Joe Biden was forcing deadly shots on children. Or so some claimed.
Frustratingly, there were early warnings that an overreaction to a poorly understood disease could be damaging. As lockdowns began in March 2020, Stanford professor of medicine, epidemiology, population health, and medical statistics John P.A. Ioannidis wrote for STAT News that we were making significant medical and economic decisions based on minuscule amounts of information.
He suggested the number of Covid deaths could be impossible to quantify. “In some people who die from viral respiratory pathogens,” wrote Dr. Ioannidis, “more than one virus is found upon autopsy and bacteria are often superimposed. A positive test for coronavirus does not mean necessarily that this virus is always primarily responsible for a patient’s demise.” Nor, for that matter, was there an existing protocol to confirm routinely and scientifically the cause of death among such patients. Controversy persists about the actual numbers of those who died of Covid, those who died with Covid, and those dying in the impossible-to-parse gray area between.
Dr. Ioannidis, who in pre-pandemic days was the subject of frequent news reports calling him a world-wide leader in epidemiology, fell out of favor after publicly questioning the extreme measures being taken. During the pandemic on more than one occasion, a Google search for his name turned up a description of this renowned physician, scientist and scholar merely as a “Greek author.” Now at least Google has rehabilitated him to “Greek-American physician.”
His demotion fits nicely with efforts by health authorities, the news media and social networks to suppress dissenting views on the virus. One of the independent journalists who probed contact between Twitter and the government, Matt Taibbi, testified on the matter before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday.
Three years later, the virus has diminished and people have gained immunity. But the cultural pandemic of distrust, anger and malicious behavior it sparked flourishes, suggesting that a rage virus was circulating in the nation’s bloodstream long before Covid arrived. That virus still afflicts us, and more outbreaks are likely. There is no vaccine for it in sight.
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