https://anti-empire.com/amp/lo…ulsive-and-all-around-us/
Daniela Lamas, a critical care doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, has written a terrifying article in the Washington Post. It’s about the non-Covid cases of sickness in her hospital. There are older Americans dying of malnutrition, young men drinking themselves to death, others with cancers that could have been treated had they not skipped medical services for a full year, and drug overdoses breaking all records.
The article is a wake-up call for those who have thus far refused to recognize that there is more to public health than the avoidance of the pathogen with the name SARS-CoV-2. Good public health deals with the whole range of threats to human well being. As the epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff has stated, “[p]ublic health is about all health outcomes, not just a single disease like Covid-19. It is important to also consider harms from public health measures.”
There is just one problem with the piece: it never specifically blames lockdowns, even though the author details all the devastating consequences of these policies. She is almost too careful in her explanation:
QuoteThough we have always known that the cost of this pandemic would be greater than the number of the dead, we are only beginning to understand its true magnitude. In what might be a final wave of this pandemic, we find ourselves treating patients who have avoided the virus only to succumb to its many unintended consequences — addiction, untreated disease and despair.
It wasn’t the pandemic that caused this single-minded focus. It was government-imposed measures enacted in response to the pandemic. She surely knows that. A pathogen alone with such a narrow demographic impact cannot cause such devastation in so many. It’s the “nonpharmaceutical interventions” – there are many euphemisms – that locked people out of their workplaces, schools, hospitals, and churches, wrecking life for billions of people worldwide.
“The long shadow of this disease is everywhere,” she writes. It’s a long shadow all right, but the shadow belongs to government policy mainly, and, partially, the public panic fueled by media hysteria that led people to acquiesce to massive violations of their rights and freedoms.
This article is just one example among many thousands of lockdown denialism.
Why do major media outlets continue to engage in this wiley rhetorical game?
Consider these headlines: Pandemic caused changes, disruptions for drug treatment programs, specialty courtsWHO says pandemic has caused more ‘mass trauma’ than WWII Pandemic caused $220 billion of global dividend cuts in 2020, research saysPandemic caused ‘staggering’ economic, human impact in global south, study saysPandemic caused 10% drop in community college enrollmentPandemic caused dramatic job losses Covid-19 pandemic caused alarming rise in mental illnesses across globe, say expertsPandemic caused worst year for US economy since 1946Has the pandemic caused a crisis in child care? How the Pandemic Can Trigger DepressionThe Lost Year: What the Pandemic Cost Teenagers
Plus thousands more. The world’s most conspicuous offender is of course the New York Times, which releases several articles per day that carefully avoid naming the true culprit, with analyses such as this:
QuoteResearch has shown that some of the disproportionate impact on women was driven by the need to care for children during the pandemic, a circumstance that is often not captured in the official unemployment rate, which accounts only for people actively seeking work.
The data in the article are solid. The problem is the causal inference. It’s always the pandemic – and yes it is true that the lockdowns happened “during the pandemic” – and never the forced closures, even though we have plenty of data from open vs closed states to prove that the whole of the economic/social/medical impact is accounted for not by the existence of a germ but by government’s brutal treatment of people and their rights.
Ezra Klein deploys what is now the very predictable trope here, where he worries about:
Quotewhat the coronavirus has done to children — whether this year will be a trauma that marks a generation, and remakes their lives. How has it changed socialization for toddlers — like my 2-year-old son? What has it meant for children who can’t go to school, who watched their parents lose work or who had family members die alone in a hospital? How do we help them? How do we even understand what they’ve gone through, particularly when they can’t tell us?
Do I really need to point out that the risk of severe outcomes from the virus to children approaches zero? Surely everyone knows that by now. The childhood trauma is shocking to consider but it’s not the coronavirus’s doing. It was the shutdowns of schools, the mandatory isolation, the forced masking, the persistent messaging that they and their fellow kids are nothing more than disease vectors.
In other words, it’s the lockdowns. Why not say so? Why the taboo?
The habit of lockdown denialism even extends to the crime pages, such as when the NYT reports on the tragic death of the ten-year old Ayden Wolfe:
QuoteAyden, an only child, had been attending elementary school remotely during the pandemic, prosecutors said, adding that he had been inside the apartment for months without in-person interactions with teachers, counselors or nurses…. Mr. Giacalone said that the pandemic was likely to have made it easier to hide any abuse Ayden was suffering.
Another Times writer, David Gruski, penned this tortured sentence: “For far too many American workers, the pandemic has delivered a one-two punch of hardship.”
It’s a preposterous claim on the face of it: 80% of the deaths associated with Covid are people over 65; below the age of 70, the chance of death from infection is 0.05%. One might expect that this would be public knowledge by now. It is not the virus delivering the one-two punch. It is government policy. It feels silly having to point this out but one has to when the best and brightest of our reporters so carefully avoid the point.
The avoidance of this reality cannot be an accident. In another illogical and gigantic piece for the Washington Post, the reporter pretends as if the lockdowns were a fait accompli, even though nothing like this has ever happened before.
“That virus, later named SARS-CoV-2, would slowly reveal its secrets — and proceed to shut down much of the planet,” says the team of reporters, studiously avoiding the obvious fact that a pathogen has no enforcement power of its own. It carries no guns, enforces no edicts, padlocks no school or business, and issues no stay-home order. It’s the lockdown that does that and the economic consequences were devastating.
The latest master of lockdown denialism is Bernie Sanders who on the Senate floor said brutally true things but somehow failed to mention that government caused them all:
