Consistent From The Start: Part II
This writer's real-time observations about covid responses
Take yourself back to December 2020, a week before Christmas. At-home covid tests traded for fifty bucks between friends. Masks everywhere, the vaccines eagerly awaited, in the earliest distribution stages. Covid blew on full blast.
Rereading this now, I’m taken back to the dominant mindset… and I’m both stunned and somewhat proud of my independence of thought, my clarity of understanding about the virus, and my ultimate decisions throughout the years-long ordeal.
It’s essential we take stock, that we remember who got this right and who got it wrong.
18 DECEMBER 2020
A quandary for you....
A very dear friend -- someone I met before my memory started, a lifelong friend -- sent me a photograph today of his soon-to-be daughter in law. She is a doctor. A real doctor. She delivers babies!
She is in her late twenties and very healthy in mind, body, and spirit.
My friend, who is my age, happily still has both his Mom and Dad and they both still live in their own home. His Dad has health issues; his Mom is a remarkable freak of nature who seems to never age nor ever get sick.
Today, the doctor daughter-in-law-to-be received the vaccine. She is proud in the photograph, happy to have taken the vaccine, showing off her arm with a rolled up sleeve and some sort of card that says to others: "I took the vaccine!"
I'm concerned....
Was an antibody test administered to the healthy doctor before she received the vaccine? (Zero chance)
Chances are very good that as many as 100 million Americans have already been exposed to the virus and have already developed antibodies to the virus. Statistically, considering her age and health, the doctor has a chance of dying from Covid at about 0.005%.
My friend's elderly parents' chance of death from this virus is more than 200 times the chance of death for my friend's daughter in law.
I don't understand why my friend sent me the photo, but if he were to have sent any photo, I'd wish it to have been his Dad and Mom with their sleeves rolled up.
For anyone over 60, get the shot if you wish. For robust and healthy people in their 20s, get an antibody test and, if negative and if a health care worker, get the shot. And if positive for the antibody, give an elderly person your shot before you take it from them.
A person over 70 is in dire risk of harm from this virus.
A person under 30 with no health issues is, for all intents and purposes, immune from it... and even if they are exposed, then ALL THE BETTER because they will develop antibodies and a vaccine dose will not need to be spent on them.
Among all the other screw ups regarding our response to this virus, how is it not one more that healthy young people - even doctors - healthy young people are receiving the vaccine before elderly at-risk people?
A sick 80 year old lovable and lovely man stands in line behind the totally healthy 28 year old just because she wears scrubs at work.
I've been a contrarian on this matter since March [of 2020], when I insisted that schools and businesses should not have been closed. I maintain that position and I'm challenging the assumed "logic" of how we're reacting to this virus.
A family was kicked off a flight because a 2-year old girl wouldn't wear a mask.
Los Angeles County never lifted lock-down, yet now is experiencing a huge increase in cases.
Both Florida and Texas have larger populations than New York, and New York has much tighter restrictions, yet New York has higher infection rates, and this despite Florida's much older general population.
One outdoor dining area in Los Angeles is shut down while film crews literally build an outdoor eating area immediately beside it.
Orthodox Jews in New York are threatened with having their synagogue permanently shut down, but protestors can march through the streets night after night.
The mayor of New Orleans intervenes to lobby an outside contractual agent to fire a performer because she sang a song at an open air event in the French Quarter.
Children are deprived of education and socializing with friends as their schools are shut, despite the reality that children are not vectors of transmission of the virus.
Hospitals in critical financial shape are incentivized to report deaths as Covid-caused because there's more money to be made for them, and this as other departments in the hospital sit idle; cancer screenings and heart testing, elective surgeries like knee replacements, etc, all go idle, creating unknowable numbers of people who will suffer needlessly.
Family finances are a mess for millions while major industries remain shut down.
I could go on...
Anthony Fauci surely spoke honestly when he first said that we are NOT to wear masks. I'm certain he knows he's lying now in telling us that we should wear masks.
Anyone who is at risk should do what they need to do to stay safe. Everyone else needs to live their lives.
And for God's sakes, if you're healthy and not at risk, leave your vaccine dose for someone who truly needs it.
Now February 2023 and that perspective in December 2020 holds up very well with time and scrutiny.
At your service…
the bec
