The Return of Covid Hysteria
The politicians and public health officials who would attempt to impose lockdowns and mandates again in the future might not even need to use Covid-19 as their excuse to do so.
It’s been nearly four years since the discovery of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, in Wuhan, China, back in late 2019. In the year immediately following that discovery, governments all over the world chose to respond to what was then a novel coronavirus by locking down their citizens, shuttering large portions of their economies, enforcing mask and vaccine mandates, closing schools, enacting curfews, and engaging in mass coercion and censorship among other tyrannical and oppressive measures.
It took over two years — in some places, over three — for the bulk of those policies to be rolled back and for life to somewhat resemble normalcy again. However, many people who were initially skeptical of those overreactive mandates and restrictions warned that, now that they knew they could get away with it, governments the world over would eventually attempt to enact similar policies again in the future either to some other virus or possibly even in the name of fighting some other threat such as climate change.
Personally, I always knew there was a high probability that similar policies would return at some point and in some form, but I thought that those who would try to enforce them would at least choose a new threat to fearmonger over. As recent developments have shown, however, it appears as though I was wrong.
Two Weeks Turned Into Two Years
Freedoms Lost Are Seldom Regained
As the inevitability of Covid-19 being yet another endemic disease that humanity will always have to deal with became clear to more and more people, their behavior changed to reflect that reality. Long after the initial emergency had ended, the politicians and public health officials who made up the Covid regime reluctantly loosened the grip they had maintained over much of society throughout the pandemic. Lockdowns and mandates were slowly lifted, and even some of the most ardent supporters of those policies began to move away from their alarmist rhetoric.
Last summer, President Joe Biden, who was a major proponent of Covid restrictions and mandates, actually declared that the pandemic was “over” in a 60 Minutes interview.
However, the scaling back of those policies didn’t include an apology for the cruelty that was shown to those who dissented from the Covid regime, and none of the architects or enforcers of those restrictions were held accountable for the damage they caused. It also set the precedent for governments to take such actions again in the future; those restrictions may not be in place at the moment, but that doesn’t mean world leaders fully relinquished the powers they gained over the course of the pandemic.
The lifting of lockdowns and mandates didn’t come about because Covid-19 was eradicated, either. The virus has continued to spread this entire time, people just eventually realized that we can’t live masked-up and locked down in perpetuity, and most people have more or less moved on with their lives.
That is, until recently, with reports of new variants and an uptick in cases leading some people to call for a return to masks and other mitigation measures. In some places, mask mandates are already being enforced once again.
As far as I’m aware, most of the mandates that have been reinstated so far have occurred in the private sector, and in my opinion private businesses and organizations should be allowed to set their own mitigation policies if they choose to do so. However, the fact that they’re returning at all — and so soon — is a cause for concern. These mandates may be starting off with private actors, but in doing so they will only make it that much easier for governments to return to them as well.
Pointless Policies
At the beginning of the pandemic, the evidence in support of masks was inconclusive at best, but they were widely believed to be at least somewhat effective. Even l have to admit, in the early days when there wasn’t much evidence either for or against masking and little was known about the virus itself, I didn’t really have a problem voluntarily wearing a mask in certain settings. However, government mandates forcing people to wear them were never justified, and as time went on, evidence increasingly came out against the efficacy of masks.
As Jacob Sullum reported for Reason earlier this year:
[A] review, published by the Cochrane Library, an authoritative collection of scientific databases, analyzed 18 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that aimed to measure the impact of surgical masks or N95 respirators on the transmission of respiratory viruses. It found that wearing a mask in public places "probably makes little or no difference" in the number of infections.
These findings go to the heart of the case for mask mandates, a policy that generated much resentment and acrimony during the pandemic. They also show that the CDC, which has repeatedly exaggerated the evidence in favor of masks, cannot be trusted as a source of public health information.
He goes on to quote two former directors of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) arguing in favor of masks. According to Sullum, the statements they made and the data they cited “were based on two sources of evidence with widely recognized drawbacks: laboratory experiments in stylized conditions and observational studies that do not fully account for variables that affect virus transmission.”
“If masks had the dramatic effect that the CDC claimed, you would expect to see evidence of that in RCTs,” Sullum continued. “But the Cochrane review found essentially no relationship between mask wearing and disease rates, whether measured by reported symptoms or by laboratory tests.”
Evidence has increasingly come out against lockdowns and other such mitigation policies as well, but I should mention that there are studies that purport to show evidence in favor of these restrictive measures.
As The Guardian reported last week:
Measures taken during the Covid pandemic such as social distancing and wearing face masks “unequivocally” reduced the spread of infections, a report has found.
Experts looked at the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) – not drugs or vaccines – when applied in packages that combine a number of measures that complement one another.
The Royal Society report, called Covid-19: examining the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions, reviewed the evidence gathered during the pandemic for six groups of NPIs and their effectiveness in reducing transmission.
These included masks and face coverings, social distancing and lockdowns, test, trace and isolate, travel restrictions and controls across international borders, environmental controls, and communications.
When assessed individually, there was positive – if limited – evidence of transmission reduction from many of the NPIs used in the pandemic, the review found. However, evidence of a positive effect was clear when countries used combinations of NPIs. [emphasis mine]
“Additionally” the article continues, “evidence showed NPIs were most effective when the intensity of transmission was low, supporting their use early in a pandemic and at first sign of resurgence.”
I would argue that, due to the negative effects these measures have on mental health, privacy, civil liberties, early childhood development, etc. as well as the economic damage they cause, the fact that they’re most effective during times of low transmission is not a good reason to use them early, as the article suggests, but rather a good reason to avoid using them at all. If transmission has to be low in order for these measures to have any real effect, then lockdowns and mandates are only prolonging the inevitable at best. Once the virus spreads widely enough, those policies become useless against further spread while still inflicting massive amounts of harm to the economy and society at large.
A good example of this would be Australia, which had some of the strictest lockdowns in the world — especially for a so-called “liberal democracy”. The harsh restrictions they used did seem to keep Covid at bay for some time, but eventually, the virus still ripped through the country despite those measures. The lockdowns, the masks, the quarantine camps people were sent to against their will, the mass use of mRNA vaccines, they all failed to eradicate Covid-19.
“Australia should have been the world’s ultimate public health and Covid vaccine success story,” independent journalist Alex Berenson wrote at his Substack, Unreported Truths, last year.
He continued:
It locked down early and hard and stayed that way for almost two years. It closed its borders and responded to local outbreaks with even tougher restrictions. Australian police used drones and automated license plate readers to check if people were more than a few miles from their homes. [emphasis his]
The restrictions largely “worked.” (Putting aside their cost to civil liberties, education, and mental health, of course, since those don’t matter to Covid fanatics.) Through the fall of 2021, Australia had few Sars-Cov-2 infections and almost no Covid deaths.
When Covid vaccines became available, Australia took an equally aggressive stance. The country’s six states segregated unvaccinated people, barring them from shopping, going to restaurants, and even entering libraries. States also forced Covid shots on many workers as a condition of employment, making up to 75 percent of workers get jabs.
“When the Omicron variant arrived,” Berenson writes later in the article. Australia “had an unending Covid wave” and “infections, hospitalizations, and deaths” soared.
Basically, in the nearly four years since the discovery of Covid-19, all of the NPIs that were used throughout the pandemic have shown to be minimally effective at reducing the spread of the virus when looked at individually. The efficacy of these policies seems to depend on how harsh and restrictive they are, and how many other NPIs are being used at the same time.
It appears that the more damaging the measures are to the economy and to other sectors of society, the more likely they are to have some effect on prolonging the spread of a disease that will, in the long-run, inevitably spread anyway. To me, the costs seem to outweigh any supposed benefits.
Future Threats
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, the politicians and public health officials who would attempt to impose lockdowns and mandates again in the not-too-distant future might not even need to use Covid-19 as their excuse to do so.
The World Health Organization (WHO) keeps a list of “priority diseases” that have the potential to cause the next pandemic. Most of the pathogens on that list, which currently includes Covid-19, have been known to humanity for some time and ways to treat them currently exist. However, there is one disease on the list in which that isn’t the case. That unknown illness is referred to as “Disease X”, and according to the WHO it “represents the knowledge that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease.”
Without a doubt, there are certainly many pathogens out there that are currently unknown and could potentially cause an epidemic, but that has always been true. That is not a good reason to grant governments the authority to disrupt our lives at will and force us to take experimental medications in response to those pathogens.
It’s very likely that “Disease X” could come about due to a zoonotic spillover, in which a disease that infects animals mutates in such a way that it develops the ability to infect humans. However, it’s just as likely — if not more so — that the next pandemic will be caused by governments funding and conducting research that causes existing pathogens to be much deadlier and/or more transmissible.
For example, evidence increasingly points to the possibility that Covid-19 was created by US-funded virologists performing gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), and that kind of research is still taking place.
Last December, a biolab owned by a Chinese company was found to be illegally operating in California. For whatever reason, that story has only recently begun to be widely reported, but it’s another relevant example of how likely it is that something could escape from such a lab, especially when proper precautions aren’t being followed.
It was also confirmed last year by then-Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland (who has since been promoted to Deputy Secretary of State) that there are “biological research facilities” inside of Ukraine. While I can’t say for sure what kind of research was being done at those facilities, I think it’s a safe bet that it’s the type of research that has very dangerous implications for humanity should it somehow go wrong. That would explain why Nuland told Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) that the Biden administration was “quite concerned” that Russia could gain control of those facilities due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The sort of research that goes on in these biolabs is often ostensibly meant to benefit humanity by studying these pathogens in order to discover newer and better ways to treat them. The potential this research has to have the opposite effect is more than a bit ironic.
Another example of this type of research comes from a recent study funded by the National Institutes for Health (NIH). As independent journalist Kim Iversen reported recently, “an NIH-funded study just vaccinated humans [against malaria] using genetically modified mosquitoes.”
“So you’re going to release mosquitoes out into the wild that carry this mild form of malaria so that you can give people malaria and vaccinate them without their consent,” Iversen speculated after asking what the point of this research could be. “Essentially a government, I could imagine, would buy the batch of genetically modified mosquitoes and release it to its population.”
Coincidentally, cases of malaria and dengue have recently been reported in the US. I have no evidence to make the claim that those cases are related to the NIH study I just went over, but the timing is certainly odd; especially considering how rare both of those diseases are in the US and the fact that they’re both spread by mosquitoes.
The current cases of malaria and dengue are also relevant to the broader point of this article, as they show how governments could use existing illnesses to once again enact Covid-era policies. Both of those diseases have been known to humanity for quite some time, but they’re still dangerous, and the fact that cases of them are occurring in the US could possibly be enough for politicians and public health bureaucrats to call for a return to mandates and restrictions.
Do Not Comply
Whether it’s in response to a new pathogen like “Disease X” or an existing one like malaria or Covid-19, the possibility of our leaders bringing back lockdowns and mandates should not be ignored. While the current mask mandates have so far been minimal and have mostly been contained to the private sector, we shouldn’t just assume that things will stay that way.
Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the measures that became common place in 2020 and the following years would have seemed unfathomable to most people. The idea that unelected bureaucrats could lock us in our homes, shut down our schools and businesses, force us to cover our faces, censor us on the internet for disagreeing with those policies, and even coerce millions of Americans to get injected with a vaccine they didn’t want to take, sounds like it should’ve been out of a post-apocalyptic dystopian movie, not the last few years of modern life.
Now that a precedent for those policies has been set, however, the possibility of them returning on a mass scale will always exist. We must refuse to comply with any future lockdowns or mandates, regardless of the reasons we’re given for them. If enough people make it known that they are willing to engage in civil disobedience, then it’s possible that any future attempts at enacting those policies will be thwarted. There are many examples of noncompliance working all throughout history, and during the the Covid-19 pandemic was no exception.
For those who are like me and believe that the government should not be able to tell business owners what policies they can or can’t set, there are still ways for us to fight back against the current mandates that have already been put into place within the private sector. Namely, we can boycott the companies that have made the decision to force their employees to wear masks by simply refusing to give them our money until they drop their senseless mandates. While that might not be enough to bring all of the current mandates to an end, it could at the very least deter other companies from enacting their own.
The lockdowns, mandates, and other restrictions that came about in response to Covid-19 were unconstitutional and severely authoritarian from the start, and they have since been proven to be ineffective at achieving the desired ends. Not only that, but they caused an enormous amount of damage to society in several different ways. We must not let these measures be enforced upon us ever again, but preventing their return will take mass vigilance and mass defiance.
Do not comply with any new lockdowns or mandates, no matter the dangers of whatever given threat our leaders choose to exploit in their attempts to reenact them. If we don’t resist now, who knows how far the politicians, media figures, and public health officials who made up the Covid regime will try to take these policies in the future.
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