Getting COVID-19 wrong

Everything we did because of COVID was wrong. Everything.

- COVID is spread by tiny aerosolized particles that can hang in the air for hours. There is no stopping this – masks are useless. Six-foot distancing does nothing. Plexiglass barriers in stores are a joke. Unless you can isolate every human from every other human, everyone is going to be exposed to it eventually. “Stop the spread” – impossible. “Slow the spread” – maybe, to some extent, but at the cost of lives disrupted, businesses destroyed, education delayed.

- COVID was not that deadly except for the very elderly and the very sick. The average age of death was around 80. Even in my 60’s, and overweight at the time, my chance of surviving COVID was about 99.7%. For healthy children it was more like 99.999%. Keeping children out of school and away from playgrounds was preposterous.

- It’s in the nature of viruses to mutate and become less dangerous, and that’ s what’s happened with COVID. That anyone is still wearing a mask or getting shots or worrying about catching it in 2025 is ridiculous.

- Ventilators were exactly wrong as a treatment for COVID, and most likely killed a lot of people who would have recovered. The fatality rate for people put on ventilators was very high.

- You can’t vaccinate your way out of an epidemic already in progress, especially when the virus is mutating rapidly. There was no chance that vaccinations would stop everyone from catching or spreading COVID. But that’s what we were promised.

- Given how long vaccines usually take to develop, it was absurd to focus on them anyway, instead of working on treatments. I don’t know how well hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin work, but they deserved better controlled testing rather then being banned or mocked. (But if there are effective treatments, drug companies can’t get emergency approval for vaccines.)

- The experimental mRNA vaccines were a mistake – they should never have been given emergency approval. We conducted an immoral experiment on billions of people at once. Their risks, such as myocarditis, were not explained, and their effectiveness was exaggerated. Whatever good they do lasts a short time. European countries were faster to recognize this, and soon stopped giving them to young people, especially children. That we still give them to babies is insane. It should be stopped.

- The idea of “vaccines passports” was evil. It was based on the lie that those who got the shot would not get or spread COVID, and yet they were still at risk from the unvaccinated. It divided society into factions, one of whom was encouraged to view the other as diseased and dangerous, needing to be segregated and not having the same rights as the others. Where have we seen this before? We all like to think that we would have protected Anne Frank, but given how readily vaccine passports were accepted, the truth is most people would have pointed to her annex and said, “She’s in there!”

No one was “acting on the best info at the time.” There were plenty of people pointing out how wrong it all was in early 2020. And they were getting banned from social media for speaking out. There were protocols in place before COVID as to how pandemics should be handled, and just about every county immediately threw them out and made up new rules from nothing. Thank goodness for Sweden showing us how it could be done better. Thank goodness for Georgia and Florida and other states that backed off from the worst policies pretty quickly. My state, New York, was one of the worst.

If there’s another pandemic, the only rational response to advice from the CDC or the WHO or any of those organizations will be to ignore them completely. They might be right, or they might be completely wrong, and there will be no way to tell as they will be certain either way.

Maybe RFK Jr. and Jay Bhattacharya and the other newcomers can fix some of this. I’m sure they’re not right about everything – no one is – but it’s hard to see how they could be more wrong than the crew on deck during COVID.

Re RFK Jr.’s beliefs, I don’t know if our childhood vaccination schedule is excessive, but kids do get way more shots than I did, which seemed to be enough. Given that there’s some risk in every shot, especially for babies, I wonder if we’re on the right side of the cost/benefit analysis. I don’t know if they cause autism, but something sure has caused the number of cases to go up dramatically. What is it?

One final semantic point: people say that things happened because of COVID, but that’s not right. COVID could make people sick and sometimes die, but it didn’t dictate policies. Those were enforced on us by governments. People are to blame for what we went through, not a virus. And none of them has paid a price.