#the actual pandemic is misinformation

[narse-tantalus]

Since I just saw a post on the same blog about countering the spread of misinformation using the SIFT method I'm going to apply it here.

Stop

Is this post provoking an emotional response? Yes

Is it trying to? Also yes.

What do I already know about the source? Twitter screenshots on Tumblr are unreliable. I know nothing about the linked pmc19.com but it doesn't look like a government or university website url.

Investigate (The Source)

What can you find about the author/website creators?

the link to pmc19.com/data resolves, and that website does seem to be the source of these claims, although the current numbers are slightly off those reported in the tweets, likely because we're a week later.

pmc19.com links to a PDF with "Background on Dr. Hoerger and the PMC". There they discuss how Dr. Hoerger (who claims copyright of the webpage at the bottom) is trained in clinical psychology, has taught and was doing an MBA in 2019 on strategic management. It claims he's "an expert in personality, emotions, and affective decision science..." and mentions he did a masters degree wich involved a lot of stuff... And also epidemiology.

The PMC is apparently "The Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative" with unnamed members who have " led many projects to keep people safer during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic." and "The PMC dashboard is cited in grant applications, including at least two grants already funded. It has been cited by trusted organizations like the People’s CDC, news outlets, and scientific journals, including several papers published in JAMA journals."

Which really sounds like they think I should trust them at least as much as I trust people who write grants, and/or "The People's CDC" -- this makes me think they are unlikely to be an accurate source.

Here's Dr. Hoerger's bio at Louisiana Cancer research center:

https://www.louisianacancercenter.org/people/michael-hoerger-phd

It says "Dr. Hoerger conducts psychosocial research to reduce the emotional and physical burden of serious illnesses. Dr. Hoerger is an international expert in psychosocial oncology as well as pandemic mitigation." And the lists a bunch of psychology stuff. Literally never mentions pandemics again. If he's an "international expert in pandemic mitigation" a) I'd expect him to work somewhere other than a Cancer center b) I'd expect his bio to mention his pandemic mitigation work. Maybe he's new to all this pandemic stuff? He certainly doesn't claim to be an epidemiologist on the pmc website, just to have worked on a project that involves it.

When I google "The Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative" the second result is this webpage which questions their methodology and suggests that their model is incapable of making accurate predictions -- claiming it's always going to be biased towards whatever happened on the same dates last year -- both low and high. (I'm summarizing and interpreting a huge amount here,so read it yourself, and the source is just a blog post so not intrinsically more credible...) But it is note worthy that the main 3rd party discussion of this organization is someone questioning the utility of their predictions.

https://buttondown.com/abbycartus/archive/we-need-to-talk-about-the-pandemic-mitigation/

What is their mission? Do they have vested interests? Would their assessment be biased?

Their mission seems to be to "track" or predict cases of covid -- but like better than the real CDC and epidemiologists. Presumably this is born out of concern for immunocompromised individuals, or boredom, or needing a project for a Strategic Management MBA, or distrust of Official Sources.

They appear to have a vested interest in pandemic mitigation, and therefore alarmism and possibly in not agreeing with official sources. Their assessment may well be biased!

Do they have authority in the Area?

No. They mention precisely 0 epidemiologists working for or with them. I don't see a reason to trust their models more than my physics grad student friends who made pandemic models on a lark in 2020.

Find Better Coverage

The official CDC (Centers for Disease Control) webpage on Covid data is here:

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home

It indicates lower numbers than last year for everything they track, numbers that are kind of ticking up in recent weeks, but numbers that are forecast (if I'm reading that right) to reach a smaller peak than in prior years.

Notably the CDC is not making any directly comparable claims about number of people infected or infectious. Or how many might be infected next month. I believe this is because these are fundamentally unknowable from the data they have, and that speculating on them would be irresponsible for public communicators of science. Sure, one could create models that predict those numbers, but publishing the results to the public without context on the uncertainties of the models would be irresponsible since people might make life or death decisions like wearing a mask or getting a vaccine based on those bad predictions. Or they might just rage at people online who disagree with them. Idk, I'm not a science communicator.

Don't trust the CDC? Tough. The New York Times ended their own covid tracking in 2023 saying:

After more than three years of daily reporting of coronavirus data in the United States, The New York Times is ending its Covid-19 data-gathering operation. The Times will continue to publish virus data from the federal government weekly on a new set of tracking pages, but this page will no longer be updated.

This change was spurred by the declining availability of virus data from state and local health officials. Since few states report more than once a week (and some no longer report data to the public at all), the weekly data reports from the C.D.C. have become the most reliable source of information on the virus’s spread.

There new webpage is here and it was last updated in March 2024, it says:

These Covid tracking pages are no longer being updated. Get the latest information from the Centers for Disease Control, or find archived data from The Times’s three year reporting effort here.

John's Hopkins University has this to say:

On March 10, 2023, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center ceased collecting and reporting of global COVID-19 data. For updated cases, deaths, and vaccine data please visit the following sources: Global: World Health Organization (WHO) U.S.: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

So yeah, reputable sources have stopped caring and link you to the CDC as the place to get your info.

Trace Claims, Quotes, and Media to their Original Context

The pmc19.com website does appear to be the original context for these claims. Thank you OP for linking that.

My Verdict:

These claims are misinformation. Specifically they claim numbers that are based on a model that was not created by subject matter experts, that disagrees with the trends reported by the CDC and it's epidemiologists. Either government employed epidemiologists are wrong and no university epidemiologists want to call them out on it... Or the PMC is wrong. Since they aren't epidemiologists... They're probably wrong. Moreover: If you don't trust the CDC you shouldn't The PMC because in their technical apendix they claim to use CDC data to make their projections. The only way the PMC could be right is if all other epidemiologists are wrong about the COVID pandemic and how to interpret wastewater and hospitalization data.

The PMC and Dr. Hoerger are engaging in academic sounding BS. They have incentives to be alarmist and fear monger, and don't seem to care or understand that they're using a model that probably doesn't have predictive value.

Data source: https://pmc19.com/data/

[coulsonlives]

That time my dad sent me green apple-flavoured ivermectin for horses 'just in case I needed it'

[inkskinned]

my brother got covid because he's a college professor and there's not much he can do to mitigate exposure when he has 200+ students per lecture. he's got a baby at home, so he does his best, but.

the governmental website for covid information is now propaganda. not a joke, not hyperbole, not an exaggeration: it's genuinely the definition of propaganda. this is biased misinformation determined to push a political stance. it is being hosted on a government server. it looks like something you'd find in a "top 10 weird internet conspiracy stories (and their origins)" youtube video.

my brother called me when he saw it. he had me type it into google. for a second i legitimately thought that i had typed something wrong. we have both taught college: we have both said "a .gov site is usually a reliable resource." i just stared at my phone for a long, long time.

i thought about how when i was a kid, conspiracy theories were mostly fun and a little spooky. unserious. i remember reading some long, complicated website about how avril lavigne is dead. how bigfoot is real. it used to be funny-and-a-joke.

over seven million people (globally) have died from covid. america has the highest death rate with over 1.2 million people.

the thing is - every time a person dies from something like a mass shooting or poverty or treatable illness - we are told don't make it political. we are told it's just something that can happen. we are told it's sad but what can you do!

the president of the united states is using a government website to try to erase the very-real deaths that he personally caused due to a complete mismanagement of the pandemic. the president of the united states is using a government server to host propaganda, undermine science and medicine, and encourage distrust amongst his followers.

nothing is going to happen. nobody's gonna, like, do anything about it. it's a thursday today, and we are just going to move on from this like we have been moving on from everything else.

yesterday my brother was outside walking his dog, mask included. a guy in a truck pulls up and shouts something about covid and whatever the fuck else. my brother has a good sense of humor, described it to me as enthusiastic! i hadn't ever been catcalled before, this was new and therefore thrilling! i do see why you hate it, though. like. i have actual covid, does he want me to cough on him?

my brother doesn't get extra time off work anymore, because the cdc practically doesn't exist. my brother said i'm not exposing 200 students to covid. his boss shrugged and said: who cares? they're going to get it eventually anyway. like it isn't a pandemic.

like it's just a fucking thursday, and who cares about it.

[always-a-slut-4-ghouls]

There are a lot of reasons i feel intense resentment (at the very least) towards anti vaxers and anti maskers. There are a lot of things that I quite possibly never do the same way again. Every time I go out or think about going out I’m reminded of this. Every time I go online and see one of those assholes I’m reminded of it. Every time I see some of my own relatives I’m reminded of it. I hate it so much. But there is something different about the feelings I get when I’m reminded of something small I can’t do. I don’t know what it is but it’s almost more sadness than anger, and when my ears hurt because I’ve been wearing a mask all day as I buy groceries and go to appointments, that enrages me. When I’m told I’m being brainwashed or paranoid because I can’t stand the thought of long covid and the fact that I could get even more health problems because those fuckers joined some cult mindset I’m enraged. When I open up the cabinet behind my bathroom mirror and see my black lipstick it’s more sad. I miss the theatrics of wearing dramatic colorful makeup. I miss the drama of having black lipstick and Wes all black. Sure, I can still wear all black (and most often do) and wear dramatic eye makeup, but my favorite thing, the lipstick, isn’t an option anymore. Only some gatherings of people or something where I need to take off my mask would show it, and getting lipstick all over the inside of a mask isn’t very fun tbh. I was never super into makeup and I have never worn it even close to everyday, but I miss when I did.

[polaritydisturbed]

Guys, guys, please—I can't do this. This episode isn't about painting UNIT as some flawless institution under unfair attack. It’s about a deeply flawed system. One that, on little to no evidence of an actual alien threat, invades a small town in full SWAT gear. That’s not meant to be a good thing.

It’s a story where the person in charge literally releases a dangerous creature to prove a point—and that same institution is being targeted by a misinformation campaign. And yet, despite those serious flaws, they do ultimately act to protect people. That’s the tension. That’s the point.

Let me be clear: this is an allegory for COVID and the online grifters and influencers who took advantage of the pandemic to spread hate and gain popularity—and who continue to do so now.

It’s about how institutions—even when compromised, bureaucratic, or short-sighted—still have the capacity to do good. They’re made of people, many of whom are trying to hold the line, trying to save lives, trying to do the right thing while the ground shifts under them.

But those imperfections? They make it easy for grifters to walk in and sell a fantasy. People like Conrad don’t actually want to protect anyone—they want control. And they know how to dress up that pursuit of power in the language of liberation. He says he’s standing up for you, for “truth,” for “the people,” but really he’s weaponizing frustration, anger, and distrust for his own gain.

Conrad always knew aliens were real. He wasn’t trying to expose lies. He was trying to punish UNIT for not recruiting him. That’s it. His whole crusade is built on a personal grudge. He rejects the Doctor’s reality not because it’s implausible, but because he wasn’t chosen.

That’s the core danger here: villains who tell you exactly what you want to hear. Who appeal to your cause, your values, your righteous anger. They frame themselves as underdogs, rebels, visionaries. But when you look closer, their plans are hollow. Destruction for destruction’s sake, dressed up in whatever narrative gets clicks and followers. People saw what they wanted to see in Conrad. Whatever oppressive system they hate, he claimed to be fighting it. He let you project your beliefs onto him—just like grifters do in real life. He made destruction feel like justice.

Ruby drank the vial, Conrad didn’t. That vial was the only thing that negated the Shreek’s vomit-based marking system, and by refusing to drink it, Conrad didn’t just risk his own life—he put everyone else in danger. Just like those that refused to take the vaccine.

And Kate, in releasing the monster, represents those who, during the pandemic, felt frustration and helplessness. She symbolizes the moment some threw up their hands and said, “If they won’t take the vaccine, let them die.” But that mindset didn’t solve the problem; it only escalated it. The monster had already shown it could mark more than one person, and there was no guarantee it wouldn’t strike again. The monster, like the virus, didn’t distinguish between those who made bad choices and those who couldn’t protect themselves. And she released it anyway.

By surrendering to that frustration, she was putting the vulnerable at greater risk, the very people who needed protection the most.

This mirrors the situation with COVID: surrendering to misinformation or personal pride jeopardizes the lives of the vulnerable, children, the immunocompromised, and those without the same choices or protections.

It was only because of Ruby that those consequences didn’t spiral out of control. Ruby didn’t just save lives—she prevented Kate’s breakdown in judgment from becoming a catastrophe.

So no, this isn’t “UNIT good, Conrad bad.” It’s a story about nuance. About how flawed systems can still serve the public good, and how those flaws are exploited by bad-faith actors who don’t care about truth or safety. It’s a warning: be careful who you believe, and why. Just because someone says what you’re thinking doesn’t mean they’re right. And just because a system needs fixing doesn’t mean you burn it all down.

The episode holds up a mirror to us and asks: what do you do when the systems meant to protect you fall short? Do you give up? Do you burn down the establishment, ignoring that it would put people at great danger? Or do you recognize that while the system is flawed, it still has the capacity to do good, and that dismantling it without a plan and without care for who gets caught in the fallout can cause more harm than reforming it ever would? It challenges us to sit with discomfort, to hold more than one truth at once.

Conrad had valid grievances, but his actions still endangered lives. UNIT made mistakes, but it still stood between humanity and annihilation. Rejecting nuance in favor of easy answers may feel righteous, but it often leaves the most vulnerable to pay the price.

That said, I do think the episode would’ve been stronger had the Shreek actually attacked or marked someone else during that final confrontation. Even just one more target could have underscored the point that the threat was indiscriminate—that Kate’s decision risked more than just Conrad. It would’ve made the stakes more immediate, and made Ruby’s choice feel even more necessary.

And yeah—I really hope we get an episode someday that digs into the tightrope UNIT has to walk. How do you hold them accountable without exposing the dangerous technology and classified knowledge they safeguard? But that's not what this episode was targeting.

[alex51324]

Now, more than ever, we need to be careful about spreading misinformation and rumors

I can guarantee that over the next few months, we'll be hearing about a lot of alarming things going on here in the US. Some of those things will be true, and some won't. (And some will have both true and false or exaggerated elements.)

It's going to be absolutely vital that important information is not drowned out by misinformation, rumors, and ragebait.

That means, when you see something that would be important if true, before sharing, you check whether it's actually true.

In library world, we use the acronym SIFT:

STOP: Don't spread the information, or get caught up in your emotional reaction to it, before you've checked it out. INVESTIGATE: Who is saying it? How do they know? If there are links or sources in the post, do they actually say what the person is saying they do? FIND other coverage: Do an internet search for key details: quotes, people's names, specific locations. If something major is happening, there will normally be a lot of coverage. TRACE claims, quotes, and media back to their original context.

Usually you don't need to do all four things: just STOP and then pick what makes sense from the other three. If you decide to share the information, you can also say what you did--"This is a firsthand account from XYZ protest; it lines up with what the local TV station is saying, but has a lot more details about what the cops did," or whatever.

The more urgent the information seems, the more important it is to make sure it's reliable.

If we're hearing every other day that this or that vulnerable group is in immediate, life-threatening danger--but 49 times out of 50 it turns out to mean Trump rambled somewhere about something which, if actually implemented, could end up having the described consequences at some point down the line--then people aren't going to know the difference the one time in 50 when the danger really is immediate.

Think, here, things like immigration crackdowns, CPS investigations into parents who affirm a trans child's gender, or demands that health care providers report miscarriages to law enforcement. We all know that these are things Trump World talks about a lot and would like to be able to do, in some form. For the sake of the people affected by these topics, we need different ways of talking about, "Here they are, back on their bullshit," versus, "This is a policy proposal for a real thing that could happen," versus, "Holy shit, grab the kids and run."

We cannot go to "Holy shit, grab the kids and run" every time Trump, or someone in his inner circle, decides to bloviate about something that could disastrously affect people lives. The people who are most in danger can't stay at DefCon 5 every day of their lives, and when they do really have to grab the kids and run, we need that alarm to be heard over the constant background hum of dread.

The same goes for action items--whether protests, ways to help, or little things people can do to stay safe/sane. There's going to be plenty going on, and nobody is going to be able to do everything, so do your part by passing along those things that you can vouch are true and important, and skipping the things you aren't sure about.

I'll leave you with an example. Remember how a few years ago, we were all-in about hand hygiene and disinfecting surfaces? And then it turned out that those were not actually very important in terms of preventing the transmission of COVID-19, and what we really need is better air filtration in public spaces--but, at my work at least, we still have canisters of surface-disinfecting wipes sitting around, and tattered old signs up about hand hygiene, and no air filters.

At the time, early in the pandemic, we were sharing the best information we knew about how to stay safe, but people got a little too fixated on that initial advice--remember how people would wipe down their groceries? And those little sticks for pressing elevator buttons?--and then when the advice changed, they didn't want to hear about it.

Distrust, fatigue, superstitious attachment to the old grocery-wiping ways--there were a lot of reasons, but the key thing to take away is that attention, energy, and goodwill are all finite resources. Try to avoid wasting it with grocery-wiping--or worse, shilling for the guy selling little sticks to press elevator buttons with.

[neil-gaiman]

hey mr gaiman. i saw that this post got revisited and wanted to address it.

i submitted this ask over a year ago on my old account and it was one of the stupidest things i ever did. it was my first tumblr account. id only been really online for a few weeks. i was 13. i was just coming back to school after a global pandemic.

ive been a fan of good omens for years and a fan of yours for longer. i was brought up reading odd and the frost giants and fortunately the milk, and as i got older i fell in love with your norse mythology book, good omens, snow glass apples, the sleeper and the spindle, and more.

i was excited to see one of my favorite authors on tumblr and tried to come up with the most bold and interesting ask i could think of.

i was rude and misinformed and it was a stupid choice of me to send it in with no thought.

but i got feedback. some in the form of kind suggestions. quite a few in the form of death threats and people telling me to kill myself.

while those specific messages were rude and hateful, the point got across. i educated myself to the best of my abilities, and eventually came back online.

not only did i misuse the term queerbaiting but i also implied that you were not an amazing supporter of the queer community. that’s absolutely incorrect. you’ve done so much for us with activism, representation, and overall kindness.

i wanted to address this ask that got so much attention because despite moving accounts i still feel guilt and shame every time i see it, or even when i interact with any of your posts at all. i need to actually address it.

also, i wanted a proper apology to be made. by no means am i now a saint. but im trying to be more thoughtful about thinking before i speak.

whether or not you decide to make a public response to this, i think ill find some peace knowing you’ve received this. ive needed closure on this for a long time.

im overjoyed and thrilled that season two is so close. thank you for tolerating the dumb questions of pretentious kids and thank you for helping to create a world where we can grow to be better than we were.

First of all, and most importantly, I'm really sorry that people were mean to you. That's awful. And nobody should ever have to deal with death threats or online threats and attacks, let alone a thirteen year old.

And secondly, you do not owe me an apology. I figure I have a Tumblr account, people ask things. Mostly they'll get nice replies, occasionally (normally when I'm being asked the same thing over and over) the replies will be terser. There has to be a certain amount of rough and tumble though, and occasionally I'll grab an ask that represents all of the asks I've had on that subject, and try and reply to all of them. That's what happened to you. I was getting tired of being accused of Queerbaiting for the occasional answer about a Season that was not yet released and about which nobody knew anything. And I needed to tell everyone who was doing this that they had to stop now. You had the misfortune to be the representative of all of the other people.

If you are not making mistakes you are not human and you are not learning anything.

(I wish there was tone of voice on the internet.)

And I think you are growing and learning and will make a fantastic adult.

I really hope you enjoy Season 2 when it drops.

[langernameohnebedeutung]

there's a lot of valid takes on why Gen Z is becoming radicalised at the rate they are - all that misinformation, tiktok, red pill, the pandemic - all have good points. But I think another factor is that even politically, their sense of normalcy is entirely different to the one of prior generations. The spiral of the last 15 years, the way the Overton window has moved, the change of style and tone in political discourse, the normalisation of anti-democratic ideas, the obsession with people's private lives, the topics that are front and centre during elections these days, the changing concept of the respect and dignity expected in a public office (god I sound like a boomer) - all of that was shocking to us.

the three generations of my family, all born and raised in VERY different time periods from one another, we've all just been equally shocked and horrified again and again these last 15 years - not just by what is happening but how it is happening and by what is possible and how easy it is to make a total mockery of the democracy and the rule of law. For all of us, that was a feeling of realising that something we implicitly trusted in to the point that it didn't need talking about ... just falling away. Or proving to always have been an illusion to begin with. To someone who grows up right now, this safety and security has NEVER existed.

But for these kids - the window of their life where they start becoming politically and culturally aware basically coincides with this downward spiral and I think that makes many of them blind or numb to it. I think for many of them, that's just their understanding of how things naturally progress and politics works. That the way previous generations evaluate the current situation - this framework of intentional manipulation and misinformation and radicalisation - is just fair and acceptable behaviour and that of course politicians manipulate the discourse to get what they want and of course it is normal to tell brazen lies and spread panic if that gets you what you want and if you're loyal to the party, you parrot those lines whether you really believe in them or not. (And let's be honest with ourselves - the seed to that has always been there)

And others, who I imagine intellectually know that things are going downhill, are really stuck in this extremely mind-numbing fatalist mindset (climate change is gonna kill us all anyway, haha) which makes you hopeless and desperate. And being hopeless and desperate also makes you vulnerable to all kinds of manipulation and radicalisation - because the offer you a perspective. Or meaning.

If you think about the trad-wife and redpill stuff or generally christian nationalism but also any movement that instrumentalises history with ideological narratives, you notice that their narratives place periods of stability way back in time in periods that match aspects of their idelogy e.g. their fetishisation of the 1950s. Then they come up with some horrible bad evil enemy that destroyed that paradise and created the 'degenerate' misery we live in now. Authoritarians and ideologues and cults have always done this. It's part of constructing the mutual enemy.

Beause this way, they can create their illusion of this kind of mythical, unreachable utopia (the past) that fascists love and attach all kinds of conditions to reaching that - with no pressure for them to ever actually deliver: women staying at home, racial segregation, christian hegemony, eugenics, absolute exclusion of gay and trans identities etc. This doesn't just have the benefit of pushing their politics on a confused youth (though that's a big benefit) - it also helps them hide from young people that these last 15 years, they literally created the chaos that these kids are living in. They sowed this situation and right now, with the radicalisation of the youth, they are reaping the rewards.

And the thing is, we can blame the Tiktok or whatever but I also think it is important that we let younger people know and feel that what's happening right now - is just not normal and not sustainable.

And yes, we need to let go of the naive illusion that "the kid are going to save the world". We should never have had that. But I also don't think a radical heel-turn vilifying all of Gen Z is going to help anyone or do justice to the situation.

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

New Fear

I have been on tumblr a long time. A looooong time. Far longer than I should have been, really.

And I've been arguing with schmucks about birds being dinosaurs... pretty much that whole time. Folks tend to get angry when a dinosaur blog posts birds, after all. It happens.

And while the game of whack a mole is ancient, it's not unpredictable. Usually, it ends in one of two ways:

the person admits they were wrong, and they back down

the person stops arguing with me and blocks me

I'm okay with either one, really. the former is ideal, the latter at least brings me peace.

Never before this past weekend has someone insisted they were right no matter what I say

And this isn't a coincidence.

Over the past few decades, anti-science sentiment has risen worldwide. I mean you just have to look at the COVID19 pandemic, or general reactions to the problems of climate change.

While of course people who think their opinion matters more than evidence have always existed, they have never been quite this bold before.

The idea that the colloquial definition of dinosaur matters, at all, is a completely new idea and one that has no basis in reality.

And yet, multiple people this past weekend argued exactly that.

And it sounds exceptionally similar to the idea that people could pick and choose things about COVID19 to believe, or the general republican position on science (only things that back up their bigotry are true).

It really seems to reflect a general increase in anti science sentiment and public anti-intellectualism.

Reality isn't actually up for debate. Reality isn't actually subjective. And science is the measure of reality

This isn't the same as the biases of society impacting science and making it worse. Saying "what people think is more important than science" is not the same as saying "science forgot a very important variable / factor / to consider data gained by different cultures / to have a wide variety of perspectives/ etc."

And allowing people to continue to perpetuate and believe in delusions leads directly to the spread of misinformation, leading to more people not understanding reality, and so on

This matters because reality matters. Because the reality of our world is not something we can change or escape. And, in fact, us ignoring the reality of the world - like thinking we can have infinite growth on a finite planet - is directly leading to the destruction of that world (climate change).

I am terrified of the rise of anti-science sentiment. I am terrified of the rise of cherry picking, deciding reality is what you want it to be, ignoring evidence. We see this from purely scientific topics all the way to social justice (how much of racism is ignoring the evidence of a) race being a social construct and b) how much racism impacts people's lives? Almost all of it).

This is bigger than birds being dinosaurs or evolution or climate change. This is about our society going on a deeply disturbing and self-destructive path.

And I really don't know what to do about it.

[covid-safer-hotties]

The next pandemic is inevitable. Australia isn’t ready - Published Sept 23, 2024

(Before you Americans yell at me, It's already the 23rd in Australia. This is very late-breaking)

I thought this was a really good breakdown of the current situation given the government-approved covid denial we live in. Long, but worth a read.

By Kate Aubusson and Mary Ward

Top infectious disease and public health veterans at the nerve centre of the state’s war against COVID-19 are sounding the alarm.

NSW is less prepared today to fend off a deadly pandemic despite the lessons of COVID-19, say top infectious disease and public health veterans at the nerve centre of the state’s war against the virus.

And we won’t have another hundred years to wait.

NSW’s gold standard Test-Trace-Isolate-Quarantine and vaccination strategies will be useless if a distrusting population rejects directives, refuses to give up its freedoms again, and the goodwill of shell-shocked public health workers dries up.

A panel of experts convened by The Sydney Morning Herald called for a pandemic combat agency akin to the armed forces or fire brigades to commit to greater transparency or risk being caught off guard by the next virulent pathogen and misinformation with the potential to spread faster than any virus.

“It’s inevitable,” says Professor Eddie Holmes of the next pandemic. A world-leading authority on the emergence of infectious diseases at the University of Sydney, Holmes predicts: “We’ll have less than 100 years [before the next pandemic].

“We’re seeing a lot of new coronaviruses that are spilling over into animals that humans are interacting with,” said Holmes, the first person to publish the coronavirus genome sequence for the world to see.

“People are exposed all the time, and each time we are rolling the dice.”

The independent review of NSW Health’s response to COVID-19 opened with the same warning: “No health system or community will have the luxury of 100 years of downtime.”

Pandemic preparedness needs to be a “permanent priority”, wrote the report’s author, Robyn Kruk, a former NSW Health secretary, “rather than following the path of those that have adopted a ‘panic and forget strategy,’ allowing system preparedness to wane”.

Why we don’t have 100 years to wait for the next pandemic The World Health Organisation has declared seven public health emergencies of international concern since 2014, including the current mpox outbreak.

Climate change is turbocharging the factors that coalesce to create the perfect breeding ground for a pandemic-causing virus, including population increases, bigger cities, and better-connected global markets and migration.

“Animals will be forced into more constrained environments, and humans that rely on those environments will be again constrained in the same environments. There will be more wet markets, more live animal trade that will just increase exposure,” Holmes said.

“It was clear that we weren’t ready [for COVID],” said Jennie Musto, who, after seven years working for the World Health Organisation overseas, became NSW Health’s operations manager for the Public Health Emergency Operations Centre, the team responsible for NSW’s COVID-19 contact tracing and containment.

“Everyone had preparedness plans gathering dust on a shelf, but no one was actually ready to respond, and so everyone was on the back foot,” Musto said. “Perhaps none of us really thought this was going to happen. We were waiting 500 years.”

Who would willingly become the next doomed whistleblower? Eddie Holmes, known for his repeated assertion that SARS-CoV-2 did not come from a lab, is deeply concerned that when the next pandemic-causing virus emerges, chances are it will be covered up.

“My worry is that if the virus appeared in a small population, say, somewhere in Southeast Asia, the people involved wouldn’t blow the whistle now, given the fact that you would get blamed,” he said.

Li Wenliang, the Wuhan doctor who tried to raise the alarm about a virulent new virus, was reportedly reprimanded by police for spreading rumours and later died of COVID-19.

The global blame game, culminating in a deep distrust of China and accusations that the virus was grown in a Wuhan lab, is why Holmes believes “we’re in no better place than we were before COVID started, if not worse”.

“I work with a lot of people in China trying to keep the lines of communication open, and they’re scared, I think, or nervous about saying things that are perceived to counter national interest.”

From a vaccine perspective, our defences look strong. There have been monumental advancements in vaccine development globally, driven by mRNA technology. In Sydney this month, construction began on an RNA vaccine research and manufacturing facility.

“But the way I see it is that nothing has been done in terms of animal surveillance of outbreaks or data sharing. The [global] politics has got much, much worse,” Holmes said.

Combat force Conjoint Associate Professor Craig Dalton, a leading public health physician and clinical epidemiologist, called for a dramatic expansion of the public health workforce and the establishment of a pandemic combat force that would routinely run real-time pandemic simulations during “peacetime”.

“No one is upset with fire brigades spending most of the time not fighting fires. They train. A lot. And that’s probably how we need to move,” he said.

“We need exercise training units so that every major player in pandemic response is involved in a real-time, three to four-day pandemic response every three to five years at national, state and local [levels].”

The federal Department of Health and Aged Care recently ran a health emergency exercise focused on governance arrangements involving chief health officers and senior health emergency management officials, a spokeswoman for Health Minister Mark Butler said. The outcomes of this exercise will be tested later this year.

Dalton said desktop simulations and high-level exercises involving a handful of chiefs didn’t cut it, considering the thousands of people working across regions and states. He instead suggested an intensive training program run in the Hunter New England region before the 2009 H1N1 pandemic provided a good model.

“We were ringing people, actors were getting injections, just like a real pandemic,” said Dalton, who once ordered a burrito in a last-ditch effort to contact a restaurant exposed to COVID-19.

Our heroes have had it The expert panel was emphatic that our pandemic response cannot once again rely on the goodwill of the public health and healthcare workforce.

According to the Kruk review, what began as an emergency response ultimately morphed from a sprint into an ultra marathon and “an admirable (yet unsustainable) ‘whatever it takes’ mindset”.

They were hailed as heroes, but the toll of COVID-19 on healthcare workers was brutal. Workloads were untenable, the risk of transmission was constant, and the risk of violence and aggression (for simply wearing their scrubs on public transport in some cases) was terrifying.

“We got through this pandemic through a lot of people working ridiculous hours,” Dalton said.

“You talk to a lot of people who did that and say they could not do it again.”

Tellingly, several expert personnel who worked at the front lines or in the control centre of NSW’s pandemic defences were invited to join the Herald’s forum but declined. Revisiting this period of intense public scrutiny, culminating in online attacks and physical threats, was just too painful.

So long, solidarity Arguably, the biggest threat to our pandemic defences will be the absence of our greatest strength during COVID: the population’s solidarity and willingness to follow public health orders even when it meant forfeiting fundamental freedoms.

The public largely complied with statewide public health orders, including the stay-at-home directive that became the 107-day Delta lockdown, and other severe restrictions prevented many from being at the bedside of their dying loved ones, visiting relatives in aged care homes and attending funerals.

“My worry is that next time around when those sorts of rules come out, people may say, ‘Well, don’t worry about it.’ They relax it in the future. Why don’t we just not stick to the rules?” said Professor Nicholas Wood, associate director of clinical research and services at the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance.

“I’m not sure we quite understand whether people [will be] happy with those rules again,” he said.

Dalton was more strident.

“I tend to agree with Michael Osterholm … an eminent US epidemiologist [who] recently said the US is probably less prepared for a pandemic now than it was in 2019, mostly because the learnings by health departments in the COVID pandemic may not make a material difference if faced with a community that distrusts its public health agencies,” he said.

“If H1N1 or something else were to spill over in the next couple of years, things like masks, social distancing and lockdowns would not be acceptable. Vaccination would be rejected by a huge part of the population, and politicians might be shy about putting mandates in.”

As for the total shutdown of major industries, people will struggle to accept it unless the next pandemic poses a greater threat than COVID, said UNSW applied mathematician Professor James Wood.

The risk of the virus to individuals and their families will be weighed against the negative effects of restrictions, which are much better understood today, said Wood, whose modelling of the impact of cases and vaccination rates was used by NSW Health.

“Something like school closure would be a much tougher argument with a similar pathogen,” he said.

A previous panel of education experts convened by the Herald to interrogate pandemic decision-making in that sector was highly critical of the decision to close schools for months during NSW’s Delta lockdown.

Greg Dore, professor of infectious diseases and epidemiology at the Kirby Institute, said the public’s reluctance to adhere to restrictions again may, in part, be appropriate.

“Some of the restrictions on people leaving the country were a bit feudal and too punitive,” he said. “Other restrictions were plain stupid, [for instance] limitations on time exercising outside.”

Meanwhile, the delays to publicly recognise the benefits of face masks and the threat of airborne transmission “ate away at trust”, Dalton said.

“We shouldn’t make those mistakes again,” he said.

Transparent transgressions Uncertainty is not something politicians are adept at communicating, but uncertainty is the only constant during a pandemic of a novel virus.

Vaccines that offered potent protection against early iterations of the COVID virus were less effective against Omicron variants.

“[The public], unfortunately, got hit by a rapid sequence of changes of what was ‘true’ in the pandemic,” James Wood said.

Political distrust can be deadly if governments give the public reason to suspect they are obfuscating.

The expert panel urged NSW’s political leaders to be far more transparent about the public health advice they were given before unilaterally enforcing restrictions.

There was a clear line between public health advice and political decision-making in Victoria. The Victorian chief health officer’s written advice was routinely published online.

In NSW, that line was blurred as Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant stood beside political leaders, most notably former premier Gladys Berejiklian, at the daily press conferences.

Public health experts said that they looked for subtle cues to determine the distinction between the expert advice and the political messaging during press conferences, paying attention to body language, who spoke when and who stayed silent.

“It is fine for public health personnel to have a different view to politicians. They have different jobs. What is not OK is to have politicians saying they are acting on public health advice [when they are not],” he said.

The ‘whys’ behind the decisions being made were missing from the daily press conferences, which created “a vacuum for misinformation”, said social scientist and public health expert Professor Julie Leask at the University of Sydney.

“The communication about what you need to do came out, and it was pretty good … but the ‘why we’re doing this’ and ‘what trade-offs we’ve considered’ and ‘what dilemmas we’ve faced in making this decision’; that was not shared,” Leask said.

The infodemic In the absence of transparency, misinformation and disinformation fill the vacuum.

“We had an ‘infodemic’ during the pandemic,” said Dr Jocelyne Basseal, who worked on the COVID-19 response for WHO in the Western Pacific and leads strategic development at the Sydney Infectious Diseases Institute, University of Sydney.

“The public has been so confused. Where do we go for trusted information [when] everyone can now write absolutely anything, whether on Twitter [now called X] or [elsewhere] on the web?” Basseal said.

A systematic review conducted by WHO found misinformation on social media accounted for up to 51 per cent of posts about vaccines, 29 per cent of posts about COVID-19 and 60 per cent of posts about pandemics.

Basseal’s teenage children recently asked whether they were going into lockdown after TikTok videos about the mpox outbreak.

“There is a lot of work to be done now, in ‘peacetime’ … to get ahead of misinformation,” Basseal said, including fortifying relationships with community groups and teaching scientists – trusted and credible sources of information – how to work with media.

In addition to the Kruk review’s six recommendations to improve its pandemic preparedness, NSW Health undertook a second inquiry into its public health response to COVID-19, which made 104 recommendations.

NSW Health Minister Ryan Park said: “We are working hard to ensure the findings and recommendations from those reports are being implemented as quickly as possible.”

The expert panellists spoke in their capacity as academics and not on behalf of NSW Health or WHO.

The ‘As One System’ review into NSW Health’s COVID-19 response made six recommendations 1. Make governance and decision-making structures clearer, inclusive, and more widely understood 2. Strengthen co-ordination, communication, engagement, and collaboration 3. Enhance the speed, transparency, accuracy, and practicality of data and information sharing 4. Prioritise the needs of vulnerable people and communities most at risk, impacted and in need from day one 5. Put communities at the centre of emergency governance, planning, preparedness, and response 6. Recognise, develop and sustain workforce health, wellbeing, capability and agility.

[violetsandshrikes]

i mean this in the nicest way possible, but we have got to encourage the general public more to have a basic understanding of statistics, and useful statistics (comparisons in particular), because for a long time i have noted that whenever i see a post/tweet/whatever where there is a screenshot of a statistic, when i go back to the source, it is never actually representing the data or what people are arguing. we’ve talked about battling misinformation a lot since the pandemic, but this is one specific issue i don’t see targeted as much

[ssmhhh]

if there is one thing i have learned from becoming a fan of The Umbrella Academy it is that 90% of the population these days is completely misinformed as to what the concepts of “character development” and “character arc” actually mean and that media illiteracy is a pandemic.

[everpresence]

why read books about the law + book recommendations

hello, gentle soul!

if this is your first time coming across this blog, i just want to say hi, i'm jas, and the purpose of @everpresence is to post teachings from renowned teachers of the law. this will range from ancient teachings to modern new thought leaders.

every once in a while, though, i will be making a post where i talk about my own personal experiences with the law. that'll start in a few weeks, though. i am going to be on vacation soon to a country i've been wanting to go to my whole life LOL! it's still unreal how the bridge of incidents leading up to it went, but nonetheless, i am SOOO grateful that i am going to be experiencing it for the first time.

anyways, for my first official post, i want to talk about reading books!

books! why should i read books?

while it undeniably is fun and girly-pop to read such beautiful and aesthetically pleasing posts about how easy the law is, i personally feel that it is best that we learn from source material.

when you learn from source, you start to gain a foundational understanding of the law and how it not only can be applied to your life, but how it is always shaping your life experiences regardless of whether you are using it consciously or not.

let's say that you're in college and you are assigned to write an academic paper. if you want to learn something and you want to understand it on an academic level, which would you want to go to first: social media or the books?

i'm not going to say outright that social media is not a reliable source. we have learned a lot from social media, especially during the pandemic. and i get why it can feel much easier to consume information in bite-sized videos or text posts. unfortunately, though, social media also happens to be a source of limiting beliefs and blatant misinformation about the law.

we take what we choose to believe to be true from social media. we choose to believe that we have to "take action" in order to get what we want. we choose to believe that we have to "spam affirmations" even when we don't feel like it.

we are choosing to accept beliefs from social media that are actually hurting us rather than helping us hone our innate ability to consciously choose the life we want to live and evolve.

but once you sit down and read the books, you'll start to learn just how simple the law really is. trust me.

i used to go through many reddit posts, youtube videos, tumblr posts, but it only made me feel more lost on what i'm supposed to be learning and doing. it is only when i sat down and actually started reading the books that i started really understanding how the law works.

and i give a lot of credit to the books for my successes hehe

reading books is not boring!

i also want to talk about a common belief surrounding reading books, and this is actually a perfect opportunity to touch on how the law works through this format. how exciting!

so if you say to yourself the following:

"reading is boring"

"reading books is a waste of time"

"i'm not going to get anything out of reading"

you are basically accepting this belief that is being translated to—for example—that feeling of dreadfulness or laziness when you are told that you have to read a book.

does that make sense?

your mental attitude surrounding the topic of reading books is what is currently being reflected as you are reading this post. and you should accept it for what it is, but you must also see that it can also (and thankfully) be changed. it's not a concrete fact that's true for everyone, but an idea that some people have agreed to believe in.

instead of choosing to believe that reading is boring, you can choose to believe that reading is fun and fruitful.

instead of choosing to believe that it's hard to understand a book, you can choose to believe that reading is easy.

and when you choose to believe that reading benefits you, you'll start to see how these beliefs shape your reality.

this is what's so crazy about the law. even when we are not using it consciously, our beliefs regarding EVERYTHING are always being reflected back to us through our physical reality.

we are always choosing what to believe to be true for us, and NOW is the time to choose beliefs that serve our greater good.

book recommendations

there's no particular order you have to read these books in, but whatever you feel pulled towards, definitely take the leap of faith and give it a read!

all of neville goddard's books -> i mean it when i say all of them because the more you read neville goddard's works, the more you understand that your life is a result of you using the law, whether consciously or unconsciously, and that you absolutely do have the ability change your life by changing your conceptions about yourself. his books are a great introduction for those who are starting to learn about the law. if i were to choose a book, though, it would have to be The Power of Awareness. for those who are completely new to the law, though, i recommend reading At Your Command and Feeling is the Secret.

Seth Speaks by Jane Roberts -> i want to preface this by saying that seth is a channeled entity. it honestly was weird for me first when i first found out about him, but through my own personal experiences, i saw how his teachings are not only phenomenal, but also true. before reading The Nature of Personal Reality, i feel like people would get a better understanding of what seth is talking about by reading Seth Speaks first. it's foundational knowledge about how consciousness is the only reality. there are also some interesting topics worth reading about such as near death experiences, how much sleep you should be getting, "coordinate points" (though you don't have to subscribe to such beliefs), etc.

The Nature of Personal Reality by Jane Roberts -> i cannot emphasize enough how much this book has changed the way i view my thoughts and my emotions. i used to demonize the CRAP out of them until i read this book, and it has allowed me to be able to process them without critically judging myself. besides that, the ideas in this book go hand-in-hand with neville goddard's teachings and even expands on them. it is genuinely so groundbreaking, and every time i reread this book, i always end up learning something new. there are also some neat exercises in there about how to change your beliefs.

The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy -> joseph murphy and neville goddard have both been taught by abdullah. i like how this book is straightforward and addresses certain topics like money, relationships, science, etc. he is mainly an affirmations girly.

[catboymoments]

okay not that I'm defending people like lolicons and shit, but like. that part about proshippers is straight up misinformation.

proship, as it is, was never only about romanticising things people view as deplorable and or problematic (fun fact, the pro doesn't and has never come from problematic!! you can look it up). initially, it was a term people used to simply say "hey, i think that's super fucked up, so im just going to avoid the people making that kinda stuff and not start shit"!!

However, during the pandemic more people got into fandoms without the knowledge of proper fandom etiquette ("don't like don't read") and it was also accompanied by the rise of Main Character Syndrome - so we ended up with young people otherwise not used to filtering their own internet experience finding darker works and going "um. why would you write that. you must be a bad person if you willingly wrote that."

(basically the same type of people who'd assume guys in long leather jackets are soon-to-be school shooters.)

and so, it spiralled into the ridiculousness we have today, that you've also been a victim of with people calling you a deviant for headcanoning that belos was sexually abusive, with either entitled and/or misguided kids & weird adults who have nothing better to do, pointing fingers at strangers online and accusing them of promoting pedophilia if the strangers in question ship two characters with a 4 year age gap. And so, what was originally a term for internet neutrality turned into a label to mark people for the smallest, sometimes non-existent, grievances.

Granted, there are some actual basement dwelling freakazoids who describe themselves as proship, but that has nothing to do with the term itself. I've seen plenty of creeps under the anti label, too.

This isn't meant as an attack, not in the slightest - my only intention is to clean up this misunderstanding, because I think you're genuinely a good person who's not in the slightest about internet witch hunts (...but if you were, it'd be kinda morbidly hilarious, given the history of deranged anons coming to your blog with pitchforks and insane assumptions about you as a person), and I trust that you're open to clearing up this egregious misunderstanding.

Hope this helps!

You are so real

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Richard Fausset at The New York Times, via Seattle Times (03.31.2025):

Joe Grinsteiner is a gregarious online personality who touts the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin. In a recent Facebook video, he produced a tube of veterinary-grade ivermectin paste — the kind made for deworming horses. He gave the tube a squeeze. Then he licked a slug of the stuff, and gulped. “Yum,” Grinsteiner said in the Feb. 25 video, one of a number of ivermectin-related posts he has made that have drawn millions of views on Facebook this year. “Actually, that tastes like dead cancer.” Ivermectin, a drug proven to treat certain parasitic diseases, exploded in popularity during the pandemic amid false claims that it could treat or prevent COVID-19. Now — despite a persistent message from federal health officials that its medical benefits are limited — interest in ivermectin is rising again, particularly among American conservatives who are seeing it promoted by right-wing influencers. Grinsteiner, 54, is a President Donald Trump supporter and a country music performer who lives in rural Michigan. He has claimed in his videos that ivermectin cured his skin cancer, as well as his wife’s cervical cancer. In a video last month, he said a woman told him her nonverbal autistic child had become verbal after using ivermectin. In a recent phone interview, Grinsteiner said he takes a daily dose of ivermectin to maintain his general well-being. There is no evidence to support people taking ivermectin to treat cancer or autism. Yet Grinsteiner believes that the medical and political establishments just want to keep average people from discovering the healing powers of a relatively affordable drug. “These guys are absolutely money driven,” he said in one video. “And when I say ‘these guys,’ I’m talking about all those politicians in Washington taking money from the Big Pharma.” Indeed, ivermectin has become a sort of enduring pharmacological MAGA hat: a symbol of resistance to what some in the movement describe as an elitist and corrupt cabal of politicians, scientists and medical experts. Although many of those experts fear that misinformation about ivermectin could lead to overdoses — or prompt people to reject proven treatments for COVID or other ailments — conservative lawmakers in a number of states are promoting legislation that would allow ivermectin to be sold without a prescription, often in the name of medical freedom.

Last week, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a law allowing ivermectin to be sold over the counter . Other legislation is pending in at least six other states: Kentucky, West Virginia, Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama and Texas. In 2022, Tennessee passed a law making it easier to get ivermectin from a pharmacist. Trump’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has in the past embraced the idea that ivermectin can treat COVID, but whether he might seek to integrate the drug into his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda remains unclear. Kennedy did not respond to a request for an interview for this article. But in 2021, he filed a petition with the Food and Drug Administration asking officials to de-authorize the COVID vaccine, arguing that ivermectin was safer. The FDA continues to emphasize that it has not authorized or approved ivermectin for treating COVID, noting on its website that “currently available clinical trial data do not demonstrate that ivermectin is effective against COVID-19 in humans.” [...] Right-wing media, however, is full of advertisements for the drug; some ads describe it as an essential component of survivalist tool kits. The website Gateway Pundit recently ran a sponsored post from an online company that offers prescription ivermectin for “stockpiling” purposes, with an illustration of a postapocalyptic street scene. Two major figures in the MAGA movement — former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., and Dan Bongino, deputy director of the FBI — have promoted All Family Pharmacy, an online outfit that dispenses ivermectin with “a prescription from our licensed doctors.” “No more fighting the system for the treatments you want,” Bongino said on an episode of his popular podcast, one of his last before starting at the FBI. “Stock up now before the next crisis hits.” [...] “The ivermectin story fits within a very, very long tradition in America of people latching on to nonorthodox therapies based in part on their suspicion that, for profit-maximizing reasons, drug companies and physicians are suppressing truth about them,” Grossman said. Grinsteiner said he was familiar with ivermectin because he runs a small farm and uses it on some of his livestock. Suspicious of the COVID vaccine, he decided to take ivermectin preventively during the pandemic instead. His wife did too. [...] He made his first Facebook video about his experience with ivermectin in January. “It was like, maybe a minute video, and I went to bed,” he said. “And I woke up and my phone was just melting.” Facebook briefly suspended his account, then reinstated it. The company has appended to some of his videos links to a “context” page from fact-checking group Science Feedback. The page notes that ivermectin and another anti-parasitic drug, mebendazole, have shown “promising anticancer effects in in vitro and animal studies. However, preclinical studies cannot reliably predict a drug’s effectiveness against cancer in humans, and drug candidates that show effectiveness in cells and animals often fail in clinical trials.”

Ivermectin’s rise in acceptance in right-wing and conspiracy theorist circles, as influencers such as Joe Grinsteiner, Matt Gaetz, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have given praise to the drug as a quack “cure” for COVID, cancer, and other diseases, will have harmful consequences.

[dertaglichedan]

HOW THEY CREATED THE FAKE PANDEMIC

1. China released staged footage of people "dropping dead" in the streets: scenes never seen anywhere else in the world prior and after December 2019.

2. A PCR test was introduced that didn’t determine if someone was actually sick. Almost all results were false positives.

3. They pushed the lie of asymptomatic transmission to justify restrictions on healthy people and mass testing the whole world.

4. Tech companies and media outlets were mobilized to censor dissent and label truth as "misinformation."

5. Behavioral psychologists were used to craft fear-based messaging and manipulate public compliance.

6. To maintain the illusion of a deadly pandemic, they needed excess mortality data.

7. Since mild cold symptoms wouldn’t deliver that, they terrorized the global population to trigger a mass psychogenic illness.

8. Constant fearmongering led to chronically elevated cortisol levels, weakening immune systems, especially among the elderly.

9. Social isolation, medical neglect, and lockdowns caused the excess deaths they needed to support the narrative.

10. They suddenly claimed masks worked, something no serious authority had ever recommended before for respiratory pathogens, turning every face into a walking billboard for fear.

11. People were gaslit into staying home "until the vaccine was ready," giving authorities more time to expand control.

12. They injected billions with an experimental product, claiming it would prevent infection and transmission.

13. When that failed, they moved the goalposts: "If the unvaccinated don’t get the shot, your shot won’t work."

14. They invented new "variants" every few months to justify never-ending booster campaigns.

15. They fabricated a new condition, "long COVID," to cover up the mounting side effects of the injections.

16. Pharmaceutical giants made record profits, protected by government contracts and zero liability.

17. Those who spoke out were silenced, banned, investigated, or publicly discredited.

18. And once the narrative became too absurd to sustain, they abruptly declared the pandemic over, and pretended none of it had ever happened.