"End of the COVID Panic?"
by Bill Bonner
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND – "Change is coming. Here’s David Leonhardt writing in The New York Times: "In Seattle (which publishes detailed data), the daily Covid hospitalization rate for vaccinated people has been slightly above one in one million. By comparison, the flu hospitalization rate in a typical year in the U.S. is more than twice as high. For most vaccinated people in a place like Seattle or San Francisco, Covid already resembles just another virus.
The risks are also low for unvaccinated children because Covid tends to be mild for them. (Plus, any child 5 or older can now be vaccinated.) For young children, Covid looks like a normal flu, if not a mild one. As for long Covid, it is real but rare. It’s also not unique. The flu and other viruses also cause mysterious, lasting problems for a small share of people, studies show. The bottom line is that Covid now presents the sort of risk to most vaccinated people that we unthinkingly accept in other parts of life. And there is not going to be a day when we wake up to headlines proclaiming that Covid is defeated. In many ways, the future of the virus has arrived."
In other words… what’s the big deal?
Vanishing Virus: Last week, we noticed similar articles in those other shills for the elite – The Washington Post and The Atlantic. The gist of them all: Maybe we’re not going to defeat the COVID-19 virus after all. Better find some way to live with it. As near as we can tell, the “lock-up-and-vaccinate-everyone” approach has been a flop. The virus mutates and circulates anyway. And it still kills people who are vulnerable… and few others. The better approach would have been to urge those at risk to lay low while the virus went through the population like a normal virus. Instead, they made a federal case of it.
But now, do these articles mean that the elite has decided to downplay the disease? Maybe. Argentina always seems to be one step ahead of us. Friends report that after some of the most severe lockdowns in the world, suddenly, a few months ago, COVID practically “disappeared.” “What happened?” we asked. “An election. It took place on Sunday. The party in power decided that COVID was a downer. I guess people are still getting sick and dying, just like they always do. But we don’t hear anything more about it.”
Here in the Northern Hemisphere, meanwhile, a winter of discontent is coming. Food and energy prices are rising. Midterm elections are coming. Democrats may figure they don’t need the additional monkey on their backs of COVID fatigue. “Normalization” may be a better tactic than more fear mongering.
Pathetic Shill: Backing up… Between 2016 and 2020, we were relentless in our criticism of Donald Trump. And our dear readers were relentless in their criticism of us. But now that we don’t have Donald Trump to kick around anymore, we turn to Joe Biden. In our view, in things that matter, there is little difference between the two. While they represent different wings of the ruling elite, they both flap up and down to protect the fake-money system...That is, neither would seriously consider cutting back government spending, deficits, debt, and printing-press money… or raising interest rates.
You’ll recall that Donald Trump proudly proclaimed himself a “low interest” kind of guy… and that one of his first acts as president was to bully Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve into lowering interest rates. Joe Biden’s critical policies are no different. But few dear readers mind our attacks on Biden; all seem to agree that the man is a pathetic shill for a degenerate cause.
Angry Backlash: Today, our angry letters come with two complaints. First, many readers still think COVID-19 is such a threat that it justifies suspending the Constitution… and forcing people to submit to vaccinations. Second, many dear readers believe the planet is in mortal danger… and that they can save it. They think there must be something wrong with us for not taking “climate change” more seriously.
Here’s a smattering of opinions on the subject. Rosemary L.: "Why don’t all of you naysayers go check out real data done by scientists on global warming? Some people don’t want to know or care to know. They might learn something that would be helpful to our environment and have to change some of their ways of doing things. Sad and destructive.
Many scientists have given warnings over the years, but people prefer to do nothing. Don’t blame Greta for at least trying. She’s probably smarter and a lot more concerned than any of you (an understatement). Good luck on the next 100 years for you and your family. Maybe living on Mars or the moon isn’t a bad idea after all, at the rate our climate problems are going."
And John K. takes a similarly sarcastic tone: "As against St. Greta, we have Saint Bill, who doesn’t “claim to know,” but of course, the insinuation of his whole piece is that he does. Or at least compared to Greta, the Joan of Arc of climate change. Because Greta took a yacht across the Atlantic, she must obviously be wrong about climate change/warming! Could that be a red herring?
And because there has been warming and cooling over thousands/millions of years, when there was no CO2 emissions from fossil fuels etc., does it follow that the present has no need to worry or to try to do anything about something (fossil fuels) that wasn’t there before and the Earth still survived? No one ever did anything in the past and here we are, thriving because of fossil-fueled progress protecting us from “nature’s hissy fits” and being told that given a long enough perspective, things are no worse than usual, where “usual” is a few million years. And maybe “global warming is a good thing.” (Hello? Still waiting for the reasoning on that one.)"
Neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post has yet issued a “Well… maybe you were right all along” on the climate issue. Our guess is that – barring record low temperatures… or an economic catastrophe brought about by “supply chain disruptions” in the energy industry – the “crisis” will go on for many more years.
Known Unknown: But the big difference between St. Greta and St. Bill is that the former says she knows what is coming… and she knows what can be done about it. The latter is more modest. He doesn’t know what’s ahead… doesn’t know if it will be good or bad… doesn’t know if anything can be done about it… and doesn’t know if it would be worth trying anyway. Most important, the former is so sure she knows something, she’s willing to insist that billions of people change the way they live, pay more for energy, and risk severe shocks and dislocations to the carbon-fueled economy we all depend on. The latter – who has actually built two solar-heated houses – would let people decide for themselves.
What neither of us knows is what will happen when 7 billion people, who now rely on fossil fuels delivered to them by long, complex supply chains guided (mostly) by market-set prices…are forced to switch to “alternative” sources of energy controlled and directed by central planning bureaucrats, lobbyists, and politicians.
Collateral Damage: We remind readers that it was during the lifetimes of some of the oldest among us that as many as 60 million people – in the Ukraine and China – starved to death. Why? Because their central planners decided that The Great Cause of their era was worth a little collateral damage. They enforced The Plan… no matter what.
We have nothing at all against vaccinations. Nor against face masks, social distancing… solar panels… windmills… nor pre-1850 living standards. Those who want them are welcome to them. But we don’t like people telling us what to do. And the fellow who insists on making something compulsory is almost always a dangerous jackass."
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