HeartDoc Andrew wrote:
> 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 ?
>
I am wonderfully hungry!

Michael