Michael Ejercito wrote:

>https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism/comments/1hxlbhp/we_should_not_be_made_to_forget_about_lockdown/
>
>We Should Not Be Made to Forget About Lockdown
>Sensationalism and stupidity reshaped the world. We should remember.
>Matt Whiteley
>Jan 09, 2025
>
>
>
>A friend of mine’s wife is a paediatric nurse who works in a ward that
>is, like most NHS hospitals at the moment, completely overrun. She
>happened to mention that the nurses refer to the current raft of sick
>children as “lockdown babies,” in other words, those who were incubated
>from accumulating immunity to germs because they were shut in their
>houses for the best part of two years.
>
>We’ve forgotten about that now, haven’t we? At the time, those who
>objected to the idea of government’s rationing the public’s daily walks
>or interaction with their friends, made the point that the danger of
>such an act was the sacrifice of the future for the present, the payment
>of huge and diffuse consequences in exchange for the capitulation to
>sensationalism.
>
>So it is not beholden to the media that were clamouring for lockdowns
>and promulgating said sensationalism to now pay attention to the fact
>that you can see the scars of lockdown almost everywhere in society,
>from health and mental health to culture, politics, in our relationship
>to technology, and to one another.
>
>Even in the most absurd places, even in a generation’s relationship to
>sex. Recently there has been outcry across media outlets at the
>popularity of OnlyFans girls such as Bonnie Blue staging mass orgies
>with “barely legal” young boys and Lily Phillip’s sleeping with 101 men
>in a day and ending up being filmed in floods of tears because of the
>emotional exhaustion.
>
>When and why do you think these people and the many others they
>represent started to say “f*ck it” and began doing this? Yeah, lockdown.
>Lockdown when all social accountability was stifled, when the seemingly
>endless, plan-less, indefinite state of lockdown felt like there was no
>reason to think normality would ever return, when politicians were
>talking about us accepting that this dystopian reality is the “new
>normal,” selling sexual content to people you will never see for easy
>money seems like an obvious and perfectly reasonable outcome. At the
>other end is a generation of young men doing what young men are
>obviously going to do when locked in their houses with nothing to do
>except flick on their computer screens.
>
>In fact we have not noticed the way in which the subtle features of
>dystopia that lockdown induced have never really left us. Lockdown
>convinced us that atomisation is somehow acceptable and survivable,
>propelled us into Elon Musk’s world where social media is the new media,
>it’s truth is the truth and our silos are where we shall remain.
>Countless public figures have gone down the conspiracy theory or
>political rabbit holes never to return, where the mildest suspicion
>about whether coerced mass vaccination was a legitimate idea led
>gradually to the unravelling of institutional trust altogether, and with
>it not freedom from the tyranny of a controlled narrative but credulity
>to any narrative selling the opposite.
>
>Then there is the generation of children not properly socialised during
>crucial periods?—?periods that we know if socialisation does not happen
>there are lifelong effects. The generations of missed education, of
>addiction to screens, lack of exposure to the world, of the collapsing
>of social accountability.
>
>Then there is the fact that the last four years in the UK have seen the
>highest rates of alcohol related deaths ever recorded, that 2020 was the
>first time in two decades when the rates of decline of smoking slowed
>considerably, which continued throughout the pandemic. An illness that
>affected mostly those with co-morbidities, many of them related to
>lifestyle, saw health messaging that led to most people waiting it out
>with a takeaway and a bottle of wine. What else would you do?
>
>Then there is the warped sensationalism that justified lockdown in the
>first place. The BBC reports today that because of the current scale of
>Flu cases patients in A&E in Liverpool are facing up to 50 hour waits.
>Two days. Which is to say that emergency departments are essentially not
>operational. This is nothing short of a medical crisis, an absolute
>catastrophe, a horrific, dire situation, a situation arguably worse than
>the covid pandemic. In fact, the NHS has today declared the pressure to
>be as bad as the “height of the pandemic.”
>
>But it barely even breaks the front pages of the news. Why not? Why
>shouldn’t the entire country be on crisis footing, shouldn’t we be
>banning person to person contact to ease the burden and “flatten the
>curve?” Ambulance waiting times, A&E times, woeful cancer treatment
>times, all these things are actually costing lives, and we don’t care
>because it can’t be translated into the same kind of sensationalism that
>covid could during lockdown.
>
>But besides rehashing old complaints and arguments about lockdowns, it
>is more important to consider how it happened, why media and governments
>became so simplistic minded and short sighted, and what it actually means.
>
>Misinformation, Misinformation
>If you cast your mind back to the murky, parallel universe days of the
>pandemic, you would remember the obsession with the word misinformation.
>Everyone from the then social media overlords, to the news outlets, to
>governments made themselves concerned with the “spread of
>misinformation,” probably expressed by the then prime minister of New
>Zealand Jacinda Ardern announcing that the government “will continue to
>be your single source of truth, unless you hear it from us, it is not
>the truth.” With this came a million news stories from the BBC obsessed
>with correcting “conspiracy theories” and “misinformation.”
>
>Yet the irony is that the entire of the lockdown movement depended on
>the public believing things that weren’t true, and on a perception of
>the situation built on sensationalism and the opposite kind of
>misinformation that the most part of the news was concerned with.
>
>I remember the very first confirmed cases of covid in the UK. I remember
>then it feeling like a science fiction movie, how the news reported
>every case with a kind of looming terror. One imagined them strapped to
>ventilators fighting for their lives, a belief confirmed by images
>circulating on social media of people collapsing in China and being
>dragged away screaming by men in hazmat suits.
>
>Of course, looking back, this seems comical. Most of those early covid
>“victims” were probably sitting in an isolation room reading a magazine
>wondering when they could go home. As Jeremy Clarkson tweeted after
>reports of him “battling” covid in 2021: “Dear the newspapers. I didn’t
>“battle” Covid. I lay on my bed reading a book till it went away.” Yet
>If you’d gone door to door in March 2020 as we were plunged into
>lockdown and asked the public the average age of death of covid, most
>people would have not said “80.” I’d guess they’d have said 40 or 50.
>
>On a daily basis the BBC was filled with stories they’d found of young
>healthy people being struck down. This reporting, at a time such as
>lockdown when people were drip fed the news as their entire way of
>trying to understand what the f*ck was going on, meant that a mistruth
>was smuggled under the door. People simply believed for some time that
>covid was catastrophically worse than it was.
>
>Not to say it wasn’t serious enough, it was, and for some people it was
>tragic. Healthy people really were struck down. But so is flu today,
>right now, so are 50 hour waits in A&E, and if they BBC wanted to they
>could find the same kinds of cases right now, because sadly that is
>reality. The problem was that this reporting was filtered through a
>newly created dynamic in which anyone not saying that covid was
>basically winged ebola was a “conspiracy theorist” spreading
>“misinformation.”
>
>So you weren’t allowed to ask how the decision was made that the
>response to a bad winter respiratory virus was meant to be the rationing
>of daily dog walks, the interruption of education, the banning of social
>contact, the ruin of businesses, the wrecking of mental health, in
>short: the suffocation of the orientation points of human meaning and
>connection.
>
>Or indeed, where it came from. The fact that by March 2020 cases in
>Wuhan seemed to be receding seemed to be justification enough that
>copying the policy of a country that literally welded doors shut to keep
>people in quarantine was somehow a morally legitimate idea for
>democratic Western countries. No one ever pointed out that no
>epidemiologist before 2020 had ever even heard of the idea of lockdown,
>yet almost overnight they all appeared on out televisions as if they
>were experts on it. ‘Pandemic’ and ‘lockdown’ became synonymous in the
>news, when the BBC wrote about schools, for example, it wasn’t the
>‘effect of lockdowns’ it was the ‘effect of the pandemic.’ Because all
>pandemics mean lockdown now.
>
>The irony, then, is that news and governments were content with this
>“misinformation” because it served the agenda of compliance with
>restrictions. By misinformation they meant anything not in line with
>“covid-bad-restrictions-good” and resulting in obedience. Sadly, some
>leaders actually liked it. There is no question that during the Canadian
>truckers protest, when even struggling single parents who donated 10
>dollars to the protest found their bank accounts frozen, that the absurd
>abuse of power on the part of Trudeau was a corollary of the dynamic of
>lockdown. Unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth.
>
>The snapping point for a lot of people was when this same dynamic was
>applied to vaccination. A six month old vaccine was virtually mandated,
>in some countries literally mandated, and anyone who observed that given
>that the FDA expects most vaccines to be tested for five years before
>they are considered safe, calling a six month old vaccine “safe and
>thoroughly tested” wasn’t just fast and loose with the truth but a
>transparent lie, was suddenly an “antivaxxer.” It’s unsurprising then
>how many people were flung down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole. If
>people are popping up on social media telling you the government is
>lying to you, when the government is literally lying to you, why not
>believe them?
>
>If you are Elon Musk, you now believe free speech on social media is the
>solution. His catchphrase has become “you are the media now,” a
>representation of the belief that X provides an unfiltered access to
>facts and a freedom from the tyranny of the mainstream media narrative.
>
>The problem though is that social media was half the cause in the first
>place. Social media algorithms siloed people into entrenched and
>absolute positions and ran events through the inevitable catastrophising
>of the attention economy. Consider, for example, how every time anything
>to do with Russia and Ukraine is in the news, immediately “nuclear” and
>“world war three” start trending. In a time where clarity instead of
>sensationalism is what is needed to make sense of a situation, social
>media projects the maddest and the worst of a situation: it is
>absolutely useless. It was social media that in part created the bough
>wave of mad sensationalism that made lockdown possible in the first
>place; the images of hazmat suits and screaming covid patients were
>around the world before the facts about covid had got their pants on and
>made it out of Wuhan.
>
>Maybe I’m pessimistic, but I actually don’t think we can recover from
>it. I think the blown trust in establishment media is so damaging its
>consequences are too enormous to track, I think our new dependence on
>social media is terrible for the possibility of any decent political
>discourse, and I think almost every public crisis since has leant upon
>the same idiotic dynamics. The world is reshaping itself politically,
>culturally and technologically because of the effects of the maddest few
>years in a long time in our history.
>
>But we can begin to look at the causes of the madness, and we can bring
>ourselves into some fresh air. We can recognise that real human
>perspective is vital, that representing disagreement as an extreme to be
>shunned as conspiratorial and sinister is a disingenuous and appalling
>way to deal with people’s legitimate concerns. We can remember precisely
>what makes liberal democracies so precious and valuable, before they are
>sold down the river to populism or tyranny. We can have better dialogue.
>It is the strangest of times, and in many ways it still feels like we
>are wandering around in the dream world we were cast into in 2020. But
>we can wake up. We can be us again.

In the interim, we are 100% prepared/protected in the "full armor of
GOD" (Ephesians 6:11) which we put on as soon as we use Apostle Paul's
secret (Philippians 4:12). Though masking is less protective, it helps
us avoid the appearance of doing the evil of spreading airborne
pathogens while there are people getting sick because of not being
100% protected. It is written that we're to "abstain from **all**
appearance of doing evil" (1 Thessalonians 5:22 w/**emphasis**).

Meanwhile, the only *perfect* (Matt 5:47-8 ) way to eradicate the
COVID-19 virus, thereby saving lives, in the UK & elsewhere is by
rapidly (i.e. use the "Rapid COVID-19 Test" ) finding out at any given
moment, including even while on-line, who among us are unwittingly
contagious (i.e pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic) in order to
"convince it forward" (John 15:12) for them to call their doctor and
self-quarantine per their doctor in hopes of stopping this pandemic.
Thus, we're hoping for the best while preparing for the worse-case
scenario of the Alpha lineage mutations and others like the Omicron,
Gamma, Beta, Epsilon, Iota, Lambda, Mu & Delta lineage mutations
combining via slip-RNA-replication to form hybrids like "Deltamicron"
that may render current COVID vaccines/monoclonals/medicines/pills no
longer effective.

Indeed, I am wonderfully hungry (
https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.cardiology/c/6ZoE95d-VKc/m/14vVZoyOBgAJ
) and hope you, Michael, also have a healthy appetite too.

So how are you ?