At this point, I have written the equivalent of
the length of War and Peace in blog
entries about Covid. I would love to
reach the point where I no longer need to do this, but, as long as there are
Covid restrictions and mandates, I will feel compelled to write about them.
Simply put, everything in American society should
now be back to normal. For the first
several months of Covid restrictions (with which I never agreed at all) in 2020,
I spoke it as an obvious truth that our country could not wait for a Covid vaccine
for our lives to return to normal. Unfortunately,
little did I know that, 17 months into Covid restrictions, we would still be
dealing with politicians trying to enact more Covid restrictions/mandates - after
all Americans have had the chance to be vaccinated. As much as I have always disagreed with Covid
policy, that we are still dealing with Covid policy now seems to me a whole new
level of madness.
From the start, I thought that the government
should not have mandated Covid-related changes to people’s lives. I thought the government should have
recommended that the elderly and immunocompromised self-quarantine. In this case, the government would have had
to worry only about compensating those who are staying home from work and the
businesses for which those people work, as opposed to the government having to
handle a mess in which the whole country is locked down. Oops. Furthermore, I believed that all of us
healthy, non-elderly people should have been living our lives, in order to
build up herd immunity to benefit those who were self-quarantining. This way, Covid would have worked its way
through the healthy population more quickly, and we could have more greatly
benefited the at-risk population.
Instead, we locked everyone down, delaying herd immunity and also
weakening the immune systems of healthier people.
As for today, I certainly do not feel that we
should still have mask mandates, vaccine mandates, forced asymptomatic testing,
hybrid "you can unmask only if you are vaccinated" mandates, hybrid
“you can only unmask if you are test regularly” mandates, mandatory post-travel
quarantines, contact tracing, mandatory quarantines for any asymptomatic
individuals, nor Covid-related capacity restrictions. I do not think
we should have ever had these rules, but we definitely should not have them
now.
After living for 17 months in a world affected
by Covid regulations, we know everything that we need to know about the
virus. While some people might feel more comfortable wearing masks, there
is no statistically valid data to show that masks stop the spread of
respiratory viruses - Covid or any others - which are transmitted via aerosols
(much smaller than the gaps between mask threads). However, we do know
that masks cause mental-health and auditory/visual-processing issues and
obstruct breathing. We have already spent 17 months making kids and
impressionable adults develop fear of seeing other people without masks.
The longer we continue mandatory masking, the deeper this fear can become,
especially for young people. Plus, as one more argument against mandatory
masking, it is possible that masks allow for bacteria to linger near
people's faces. The costs of masking clearly outweigh the benefits, if
any exist. Thus, I feel that masks and goggles (if people are worried about
contracting Covid through their eyes) should be optional (as they should have
always been).
Meanwhile, in terms of all of the quarantine
rules, we have spent 17 months conditioning people to feel ashamed of getting a
virus or of transmitting it. We now know that asymptomatic spread of
Covid happens at a negligible frequency. Plus, anyone who wants to be
vaccinated has had the chance to be vaccinated. Even more importantly, I
have always said that, under my “let people assess their own risk” mentality,
anyone who chooses not to self-quarantine is accepting the risk of contracting
the virus from someone. Therefore, it
is long past the time to eliminate quarantine rules and mandatory testing,
especially in sports.
Speaking of sports, pro athletes are some of the
healthiest people in the world. Their
risk of dying from Covid is infinitesimally small, and their risk of a serious
Covid issue is minimal. In fact, people
aged 0-19 years have a 99.997% survival rate if they contract Covid; people
20-49 have a 99.98% rate; and people 50-69 have a 99.5% rate. However, that is ignoring the fact that
obesity and other major pre-existing health concerns drastically increases
one’s Covid-death risk. Thus, for people
not in those at-risk categories, their Covid survival rates are yet closer to
100%. This means that a healthy person
under the age of 50 is more likely to die if he/she gets the flu than if he/she
gets Covid. For a healthy 50-69-year-old
person, it is more of a toss-up as to which is more dangerous. However, the fact remains that Covid is
dangerous for only the elderly and immunocompromised, and our public-health
response should have been focused protection.
I know that some people like to cite one-off cases of healthy people
dying of Covid, but we should not base policy and restrict freedoms based on
worst-case scenarios, nor should we have done that in the past. There is no sound reason to mandate asymptomatic
Covid testing in sports, or anywhere else for that matter.
Speaking of restricting freedoms, I believe that
vaccine passports are a terrible idea.
Just to be clear, I am not an “anti-vaxxer”. In fact, I did get the Johnson & Johnson experimental
Covid vaccine, but I will not be getting boosters. Before getting my vaccine, I felt that my
probability of a serious adverse effect from the vaccine and my probability of
a serious bout with Covid (if I were to get Covid) were roughly equal. Thus, I sheepishly erred on the side of
getting the vaccine. However, I felt
terrible for a week afterward – having many moments of nearly passing out and
being dizzy. Plus, I had a headache for
three weeks. Given that it is becoming
clearer and clearer that the vaccines are really therapeutics, not true vaccines,
I might have been better off not getting the vaccine. After all, I can still get Covid, and I can
still pass it to others. However, if I am
ultimately to contract Covid, my natural immunity against Covid is long-lasting
and likely to be strong against variants.
To the contrary, if Covid vaccination offers any protection against contracting
and spreading Covid, that protection lasts only a few months. That said, I started this paragraph talking
about being anti-vaccine-passport, and I will dive back into that premise in
the next paragraph.
Deviating from what I said a moment ago, let us
temporarily assume that experimental Covid vaccines do keep a person from
contracting Covid. In that case, it
should not matter to that person if others are vaccinated. It seems to me
that; for some people, the risk/reward analysis favors being vaccinated, while,
for others the analysis favors refusing vaccination. Therefore, I believe
that the choice of whether or not to vaccinate should be personal and
private. It should not matter to me whether or not you are
vaccinated.
Meanwhile, the latest data indicate – as I
discussed earlier - that the experimental Covid "vaccines" should be
in quotes, as these medical interventions are truly therapeutics, not
vaccines. What we are calling "vaccines" do not do much to stop
the spread of Covid - and any spread stopping likely lasts for only months, not
years - but said vaccines can decrease the symptoms' severity if the vaccine
recipient contracts Covid. Therefore, if it is the case that vaccines do
not or only minimally stop the spread of Covid, it also means that it should
not matter to a vaccinated person if someone else is vaccinated.
Therefore, this “vaccine passport” idea is
medical segregation, and it is terrible for society. It greatly bothers me that so many people are
vaccinated and look down upon people who are not vaccinated. Who cares whether others have chosen to be
vaccinated? Why do you care? I do not look around at people in a mall and
worry, “Is that person vaccinated? What
about that one?” Unfortunately, our
government and the media are perpetuating the idea the people should worry
about unvaccinated people, and this is bringing out the worst in so many
people. (This follows the government and media perpetuating the idea that
people should worry about others not socially distancing or others not masking. None of this mentality has been good for our
society.) Now, let me be clear
here. In a hypothetical scenario in
which the vaccine provides great benefit to others but minimal benefit to the
recipient, I would be on board with vaccine passports. However, this is not the case with Covid
vaccines. Segregation is typically a
very bad thing, and, if a government is going to enact segregation, the
benefits had damn well better far exceed the costs. That is not the case here though. I see no benefits to vaccine passports, but I
do see the costs of labeling a group of people as “beneath” another group. That mentality historically leads to bad outcomes.
Furthermore, Covid is becoming endemic, like the
flu or RSV (colds). As I have mentioned, the potential exists that the
vaccines give minimal immunity and/or immunity for only a few months against
Covid. Thus, I expect that Covid vaccines are going to become an annual
option along the lines of flu vaccines, in which some years the vaccine works
better than other years, depending upon the various strains present in a given
year. I do not want to see us enter a world in which every year sees us
counting cases, deciding when to mandate masks, deciding when to quarantine
healthy people, mandating experimental vaccines for entry, and so on.
Thus, I believe now it is vital that we return to normal.
I will finish by talking about how ridiculous it
is that President Biden (and so many others) are calling out Florida Governor
Ron DeSantis for not mandating masks and not implementing Covid
restrictions. The government exists to
protect freedoms, not to restrict them. It is astonishing that President Biden
can claim that Ron DeSantis is “getting in the way” by letting people be
free. If someone in Florida wants to
self-quarantine, he/she can do that.
However, Governor DeSantis lets people decide how to live their lives,
from a Covid perspective. If someone
wants to live normally, that person accepts the risk of Covid and many more
risks too. Any non-elderly,
non-immunocompromised person is taking on many risks greater than that of Covid
by living his/her normal life. Furthermore,
in the history of the country, we have never negatively judged a governor
because he/she presided over a state with the highest total or per-capita
number of flu deaths in a year. We have never negatively judged a governor
because he/she presided over a state with the most fatal car accidents or
drownings. It has never been reasonable to
criticize a governor for the number of deaths his/her state has seen for these
afore-mentioned reasons. The only
exception would be if a governor happened to enact policies that actually
caused the deaths – such as sending Covid patients into nursing homes or
forcing Covid patients unnecessarily and fatally onto respirators. This exception covers multiple governors, but
Governor DeSantis is not one of them. To
the contrary, telling people to weigh their own risks and to make their own
cost-benefit analyses is what the United States of America is all about. Kudos to Ron DeSantis for grasping this. I should also note that Florida’s current
case “spike” has not been accompanied by a major spike in
deaths/hospitalizations and that Florida’s age-adjusted death rate during the
past 17 months has been below that of most states with more draconian Covid
restrictions.
Furthermore, I have listened to several of
DeSantis’ roundtable discussions with brilliant scientists and epidemiologists
who say that “focused protection of the vulnerable population” has been the
correct strategy all along. These
scientists have been shunned and censored, and it is abhorrent that this
censorship is taking place in the United States. However, I applaud DeSantis for following the
actual science, not following the dogma that the Left/media refer to as “the
science” (aka “anything that deviates from the approved left-wing/media
narrative). Also, good Lord do I hope
that President Trump exits the stage and that we can have President DeSantis in
2025.
OK, one last note: I feel that anyone who still
takes Dr. Fauci or the CDC seriously at this point is like a 40-year-old who
still believes in Santa.
Thank you for reading.
