This little bug of ours...

My mother called me up to let me know about her experience with a certain infamous pandemic.

At least, we figure that's probably what she caught¹. No debilitating effects whatsoever (as even the CDC readily admits; in her case she didn't even have the flu-like symptoms²), but she lost her sense of smell for ten days. She was actually relieved because she has always been hypersensitive to smells, especially perfumes, and she said, I quote, "It was a vacation."

(1 This is about as accurate as any other sort of testing. There have been numerous examples of doctors claiming a particularly bad illness "must" be Covid without bothering to test, or even claiming that a person has it... despite multiple negative tests.)

(2 One has to wonder if, in some of these cases, it is in fact the flu.)

No one in my entire extended family has previously even heard of a person who has actually caught this thing, either. No one has caught it since (or before) my mother did, either.

The only way the virus has truly affected the lives of anyone I know (quite a lot--there are something like 35+ people who are cousins, aunts, or uncles, and my dad has at least as many people he regularly corresponds with) is by closing down our economy and by adding a weird fascination with several vaccines that STILL are not approved by the FDA and that use some rather suspect technologies.

I'm quite impressed by and looking forward to the results of the new technologies that are being advanced in vaccine research right now, but I have to say it also makes me nervous that said techniques are normally discussed in conjunction with gene therapy. Assuming that we survive whatever secret cocktail is in the vaccinations, at least we'll have a good start on eliminating cancer (so far, reports of severe side effects are very rare, but with how many people they want vaccinated with this experimental brew I'm slightly worried about what the eventual numbers will be).

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The historical story of this virus has been even more "interesting."

I recall that the original goal of the quarantine and other measures was to kill off the virus by stopping it from spreading. This was the reason that we had such draconian measures deployed in efforts to put people in house arrest and shutting down all businesses. You know, like China and co during the SARS virus a few years ago. It feels a bit awkward when your land of the free can be compared to a despotic socialist regime. (As a side note, about a third of the businesses where I live have gone out of business over the past year. Some of them were older than me! I've heard somewhere that there's a law that, in the event of such shutdowns, the government responsible (in this case, the state; the Michigan shutdowns are widely considered unconstitutional, but there's a bloc of the governor, attorney general, and a few other people that's stonewalling any discussion with the rest of the government as they were supposed to have done. Somehow they also managed to throw out all the petitions. Having been involved, I know there were a lot more signatures than they claim to have received...) is supposed to pay fees to keep the business alive while it's shuttered. I look forward to the lawsuits, but not the resulting tax increases...)

Soon it came out that we had no hope of stopping the virus, but we'd still keep the quarantine in place so that the hospitals didn't get flooded by all the people who'd need a respirator to survive this thing. We'd try to slow the spread so that everyone got sick slowly enough that we could treat them. Almost since the start, the local hospitals started building extra wards to hold all the sick. If I recall correctly, the most patients any of the three hospitals near me have seen has been two Covid patients at a time (and that was the unusually high number). My work (and most similar directives I've heard about) simply ask anyone infected to stay home instead (and inevitably infect our families, if they still live with us, unless we have mansions). I guess we don't need the hospital visits after all, since it's safe to stay at home. If they even get it in the first place.
(Meanwhile, death rates for everything else were skyrocketing since hospitals were refusing to take non-Covid patients (even for things like cancer treatment) and patients don't want to go in fear of catching the virus.)

At the same time, the nursing homes started filling up with patients, infecting the elderly and high(er) risk people there. Given the death records that show that nursing homes are responsible for 43% of all Covid deaths, I can only hope that this was a horrible oversight and not an intentional evil. Of course, no one has been allowed to visit their allegedly-dying relatives, so who actually knows the true story (I also imagine that most people would want to actually be there for their relatives, but this is another choice that has been taken away from us).

I'll now note that a lot of the death reports have been falsified since medical care is free if it was from the virus (I can't prove the falsification part directly since that part of this fact is from dad's friend network, which includes some people who've benefited from such free care and some hospital workers). On top of that, newer reports are also making it sound like Covid wasn't the main or only cause of death for most cases, even when it was involved (summary: 6% of deaths were from Covid; the others had nearly three, on average, other causes; and most people have a sub-¹/₂-percent chance of death from this thing unless they're over 70 years old.)

We've now discovered that the virus has a pretty low mortality rate in developed countries (so, about 1.8% in the US (at most--see above about the false reporting) of those who've actually caught it), and the hospitals are clearly not having problems in most states (NYC possibly excepted, and even then there are questions about that), but we're still keeping up the quarantine measures across the board. Despite the fact that most people are perfectly fine or have even caught and recovered from it without even knowing they ever had it, many businesses remain closed and many citizens are still stuck in their homes ordering all their necessities.

Dr. Faucci has unilaterally been increasing the number of immune people before businesses reopen as well, simply because it looked like we were going to reach the lower target. No consultation of medical data or reasoning behind it, just the fact that it "looked feasible."

Now we're learning of side effects of the vaccine itself (and in some cases, worsened cases of the virus when vaccinated people catch it anyway), and no one can get compensated (in some cases for actual deaths) since it's experimental (the wording on most sites and informational pages make it sound like it has been tested and approved. Nope, you're the test subject, and this dispensation was made since Covid was thought to be dangerous). At least your insurance will pay out if you catch the actual disease instead!

Even Dr. Faucci thinks that the vaccine won't actually help with or end the pandemic. I'm sure that with existing anti-vaccine sentiment (I'd ordinarily say that anti-vaxxers need to redo their research, but this one has been an embarrassment for everyone), proof of a vaccine that actually doesn't work is going to cause a worsening of that crisis. Private emails and a news article I've read admit that various authorities are trying to find ways to encourage people against their will to take a vaccine that they're unwilling to get, with too little testing and possible side effects... and that may not actually help at all. This is going to sink any potential desire people have to listen to politicians...

We still don't know if they actually work, suspect they only reduce the effects of catching the virus, rather than making you immune, and you still have to isolate, wear masks, and social distance. Remind me what the point is? They can't make you immune, can't stop the spread, can worsen the effects of catching it ANYWAY... I'm horribly disappointed by this. Every other disease's vaccine actually works at keeping you safe, and I in fact am completely for getting vaccinated (for everything else). I'm caught up on all my other vaccines. Hopefully this does not affect anyone's faith in vaccination as a reliable and important preemptive treatment method.

On top of the previous information, there are now a number of separate research teams discovering the following facts (and then having it get blacklisted every time they try to tell anyone about it via most media):

• Social distancing does little. It doesn't matter if you're six or twenty-six feet apart. You won't catch it. You need to be within 1.5 feet to be in the normal disease transmission zone. The CDC concurs. I've actually seen an airlines ad (it was a Youtube pre-video ad, so sadly no link) that did particulate testing and "proved" that being in a sealed, cramped metal can inches from another person is still safe. In the process they basically proved that everything else that has more distance or better ventilation is also safe from spreading Covid. Oops.
• Masks do nothing. The virus floats right through them (especially those cheap ones you probably have). This makes sense, as it took the electron microscope to find viruses and solve that last little issue with Germ Theory (and of course they made it through filtering back then too). The first link also discusses a number of other points from this table, if you wanted more supporting evidence.
• Masks actually worsen the effects of catching it, since they reduce the amount of oxygen you get and increase CO2 levels (not to mention inhaled plastics). Slightly, but it's enough to weaken your immune system a bit.

Other interesting links:
https://www.foxnews.com/media/fauci-dont-eat-indoors-even-after-getting-vaccine
https://nypost.com/2021/04/10/fauci-not-sure-why-texas-doesnt-have-covid-uptick-after-nixing-masks/
https://www.breitbart.com/science/2021/04/10/florida-reports-fewer-coronavirus-cases-per-capita-than-new-york-pennsylvania-michigan/
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2020/04/03/assume-a-spherical-cow-of-uniform-density-in-a-frictionless-vaccum/