Do you ever see news stories where you feel like there’s a gaping hole in the information presented? When the Covid-19 pandemic started our health and government officials and a compliant news media propelled many news stories that stoked fear among people and that led to a great deal of complacency among the American people. Most Americans, according to polls, initially bought into into an array of social mitigation efforts and went along with them without demanding more information.
For most of America, people have moved past Covid-19 and it’s not even on their radar as a concern, being replaced with rising gas prices, talk of war, and warnings of looming food shortages, but we should think about all those social mitigation efforts, which pushed actions that we were told were based on “science.” The scientific research does not support them, but many of our political leaders still will use that “unprecedented” pandemic emergency as a model for future emergencies.
The Canadian truckers protest and the Trudeau government’s extreme reaction, citing a national emergency as the justification to begin freezing Canadian citizens bank accounts, fell to the wayside as a major international news story when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Here’s another timeline to think about:
February 21, 2022 – Putin ordered troops to Ukraine and western countries began issuing sanctions.
February 23, 2022 – Canada lifted the freeze on truck protester bank accounts.
February 24, 2022 – Russia invades Ukraine
February 26, 2022 – Some countries remove Russia from SWIFT and begin targeting Russia’s Central Bank.
It seems certain the the international crisis with Russia invading Ukraine and the need for a response from the West to that crisis superseded draconian domestic measures intended to intimidate Canadians opposed to Trudeau’s new COVID vaccine mandate pertaining to truckers crossing the US-Canadian border – which was the reason those Canadian truckers were protesting.
While the news media here in America has become all about Ukraine 24/7, Covid-19 and the social mitigation craziness aren’t gone. Even more concerning is too many Americans seem happy to just forget all about the government actions and even corporations acting as a surrogate White House enforcement force to impose social mitigation rules on millions of Americans. No one seems to want to look back, study what worked, what didn’t work, and more importantly why these policies were imposed on Americans.
Certainly it’s understandable that Russia invading Ukraine raised the specter of world war and even nuclear war, when Russia ventured into nuclear saber-rattling, but the pandemic craziness isn’t gone and it’s important to start seriously thinking about what happened, to prevent media-generated mass panic disarming our ability to resist government overreach again.
I bring this up because the lockdown idea was touted in 2020 by many prominent US health officials as an effective social mitigation strategy based on hyping that China was doing it and it was working. Let’s look back to 2020:
As COVID-19 spread rapidly across China, authorities took an aggressive stance to fight the coronavirus. They were slow to respond to the outbreak—at first suppressing information and denying that it could spread between humans even as it did just that. But, as case numbers skyrocketed, Beijing went to extraordinary lengths to fight the virus, identified at COVID-19, in a campaign Chinese President Xi Jinping has described as a “people’s war.”
The most dramatic, and controversial, of the measures was the lockdown of of tens of millions of people in what is believed to be the largest quasi-quarantine in human history.
Less than two months after the lockdown went into effect, it appears to be working, at least according to Chinese health officials, who announced on Thursday that the country had passed the peak of the coronavirus epidemic. They reported just eight new cases of the virus the same day, the lowest number since they began publicly releasing numbers. At the same time, cases of COVID-19 across the world are skyrocketing.
Let’s move from China’s 2020 lockdown/Covid Zero approach to right now in China:
What’s not known is how many people in China really died from the initial COVID-19 outbreak and how many have died since then. That’s been one of those gaping holes in the reporting since the beginning. The larger question now is why on earth did our government and health officials embrace a social mitigation policy trusting in “according to Chinese health officials” in the first place? Can it happen again in America?
With the war in Ukraine, it may move from a 24/7 news story that galvanizes new media time and resources to a regional conflict, as Americans lose interest in the story and other domestic news attracts more attention, plus as we move closer to fall, national elections, with control of Congress in the balance, partisan political news will dominate in our news media. Covid, showing every sign of being a virus that spreads in waves, will likely hit again and there will be American government and health officials clamoring for more social mitigation efforts and assuredly our American news media can shift on a dime to inciting Covid-panic once more.
Instead of just going along with this politically expedient “time to move on” effort to put Covid out of our minds, I feel certain, the same officials, pundits and media who pushed the Covid hysteria since 2020 will reemerge when another Covid wave hits in the US and they’ll be repackaging all of their made in China social mitigation lockdown ideas again.
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