Here my writings on and around the COVID-countermeasure era will be gathered.
For natural reasons, barring unexpected developments, there will be few new texts added, and in the long term the category will consist mostly of texts once written for my Wordpress account, likely with some consolidation, rewriting, and similar. However, here “long term” is the key phrase and the current contents will be rare new texts.
(For interim access to the old texts, search my Wordpress account with something like covid.)
Note that the placing of this category as a sub-category to Politics is very, very deliberate. Not only did my writings deal mostly with the extended political aspects (including effects on the economy and the rights of the individual), but COVID was mostly a political phenomenon. Yes, the disease was/is real, but the ramifications of the disease, per se, were comparatively small. The political ramifications, often due to incompetence and/or dishonesty among politicians and their medical advisers, were gigantic—mind-numbingly large.
In particular, almost every claim that I, even to this day, read about “COVID did this-and-that” (“caused this-and-that damage”, whatnot) should read “the COVID countermeasures did this-and-that” (and so on). For instance, COVID did not wreck the economy or keep children out of school—the countermeasures did. To this, I note that it has now long been clear that the countermeasures were disproportionate, medically unfounded, contrary to prior standard practices, based more on fear-mongering and blind panic than on scientific insights—and did much, much more harm than good. Moreover, this was not unexpected: my very first post, on 2020-03-15 (!), at the very beginning of the countermeasure era, raised the question of whether the cure would not be worse than the disease.
(Why e.g. journalists still insist on speaking of “COVID did this-and-that” is unclear. It could be plain incompetence, be it through misleadingly sloppy language or complete ignorance of what has truly taken place. It could be ideologically motivated. It could have some entirely different explanation. At any rate, it cements my already very low opinion of journalists as a group.)
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