“So today, we will make history,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) intoned somberly over the chatter of camera shutters. “When the [House] managers walk down the hall, they will cross a threshold in history delivering articles of impeachment against the president of the United States for abuse of power and obstruction of the House.” One day earlier, on January 14, 2020, science.org had reported on “a new SARS-like virus found in China.” The speaker’s pomp and circumstance notwithstanding, history seems to have taken more interest in the virus than her impeachment farce.
Much like a midwestern driver speeding through the summer darkness, it’s not always immediately clear whether the object approaching one’s windshield is a deer or just another bugsplat in the night. To the thinking of Pelosi and so many others, the impeachment hearing over some phone call between Trump and the Ukrainian president was supposed to be the crash through the windshield of history. In contrast, the virus from the obscure province in China, they figured, would splat harmlessly and with little notice.
It’s worth remembering how difficult it can be to gain perspective of historic events as they fly toward our proverbial windshield. Pelosi, who has an uncanny ability to predict stock performance, usually misses the boat when it comes to assessing the long-term significance of news stories. Thus, when her party raises new alarm over the new Omicron variant (pronounced, “OmyGoDIcantBelieveTHISisHAPPENING-again-icron”), we should judge for ourselves whether we’re in the midst of another bloody mess like the one few foresaw in January 2020.
It’s possible—and I know this sounds crazy—that the Omicron variant actually represents good news.
Hear me out. Early signs indicate that the Omicron variant lacks the death-dealing symptoms of its predecessors yet spreads much more quickly even than the fast-moving Delta variant. Even the sainted Dr. Anthony Fauci finds himself backpedaling on the reflexive fear-mongering, saying, “[I]t does not look like there’s a great degree of severity to it.” Thus, it seems possible that the Omicron could spread natural immunity quickly and relatively harmlessly through the population and, God willing, we can be done with this.
One South African doctor who helped address the very earliest cases of Omicron reported that the symptoms of Omicron were, “very mild.” This, of course, will not stand. Fear is the currency of power and nobody is going to bend the knee just to avoid an evening of chills and fatigue.
CNN, seeking to prop up its own relevancy, has again hit the well-worn panic button. On Saturday, Dr. Megan Ranney published an opinion piece describing the Omicron variant as, “dreaded.” Instead of focusing on the mild symptoms, the doctor sowed panic, warning, “It’s not looking good. One preliminary model suggests that Omicron spreads twice as easily as the Delta variant. This is the reason that many of us scientists are warning people to mask up in public and go get their booster.”
Do masks work? That question will always start an argument. Does the booster work against Omicron? Ranney admitted we don’t know whether boosters have any effect on the new variant.
The Biden Administration has announced new measures to combat the virus—which look a lot like the old measures from 2020. These appear to include plans for booster mandates, “to ensure that the nearly 100 million eligible Americans who have not yet gotten their booster shot, get one as soon as possible.” Again, do the boosters work on Omicron? Stop asking questions, science denier!
Further, the Biden Administration will expand vaccinations of children to protect against Omicron. Are the risks of Omicron to children more or less deadly than the chance of the vaccine inflicting heart damage, i.e. myocarditis and pericarditis? It seems a relevant question but social media nevertheless censors virtually any reporting on side effects as, “misinformation.” Remember when they censored stories about the Hunter Biden laptop? Or the censorship of the Wuhan lab leak origin hypothesis? Or when social media didn’t censor blatant falsehoods about the Kyle Rittenhouse Kenosha shootings but did censor posts supporting Rittenhouse and suppressed efforts to raise funding for the ultimately innocent Rittenhouse? The censorship, ironically, makes misinformation more credible and destroys the clash of ideas that are vital to informing the democratic electorate.
The Biden Administration also plans to “launch a new public education campaign,” to encourage adults to get boosters with a special emphasis on the skeptical “communities of color.” It’s hard to imagine that anyone in America could escape the constant drumbeat of “education” that saturates our airwaves and electronic media.
Clearly, Pelosi misdiagnosed the January 2020 moment in history in which she found herself impeaching then-President Trump for . . . something about a phone call. She’s not going to miss out on the panic this time. She recently urged Americans, “our message is that we have to respect governments”—meaning vaccine mandates.
Most reasonably intelligent Americans make choices about risk every day. Mandates and censorship deprive individuals of the ability to make their own informed decisions. Even more troubling, nearly one-in-three healthcare workers who work in the medical field are still refusing to get vaccinated in spite of, presumably, having the best access to information. Indeed, the one-in-three rate appears to be slightly higher than that of the general population.
Why are so many doctors and nurses “anti-science?” None of this builds confidence in the dictates of bureaucrats who have wrested real power away from elected governments.