No Government Can Make as Many Mistakes and Errors About COVID as Ours Did; It Requires Intent

streiff reporting for RedState 

A little earlier today, my colleague Nick Arama posted on a Washington Post editorial about the futility of mask mandates (see WaPo Finally Says It: ‘Mask Mandates Didn’t Make Much of a Difference Anyway’). If this sounds a little strange given the fights raging across the nation, and the so-called Western world, about mask mandates, it should. In fact, it should seem strange even by the standards of the Washington Post editorial section that published the story.

How does the Washington Post story fit in here?

The hallmark of the so-called public health information associated with COVID, going back to the earliest days of the “pandemic,” professed a certainty with which we were all obliged to go along on pain of public ridicule.

For instance, look at the early models for disease spread. These have now proven to be so wildly inaccurate that they don’t merit the term “guesses,” much less that of “models.” Note that the purveyors of those “models” have suffered no professional or financial or penal (yes, I think Neil Ferguson and everyone on his team should be serving life-without-parole in a forced labor camp above the Arctic Circle) consequences, their models are still quoted, and we are still supposed to take them seriously.

A quick look back and we soon have an extensive list of things that were fed to us as “facts” and have since been proven wrong. For instance:

Masks. We’ve been told to wear a mask, don’t wear a mask, wear two masks, wear masks when walking through restaurants but not when sitting. COVID guru Dr. Anthony Fauci pooh-poohed and then demanded we all wear masks without any change in the scientific data. Even now we have the dichotomy of school districts requiring masking while going to a school sporting event is mask-free.

Deep-cleaning. Remember when we were pestered to ensure we washed all the stuff we bought at the store and stores closing early to “deep-clean” the facilities. Bogus. Every last bit of it was not only bogus at the time, it was known to be bogus when it was required of us.

Asymptomatic spread is rare. Now we’re told that the spread of the virus by people who are asymptomatic is common. Is it?

The vaccine will protect you. That statement has now been modified to mean that the vaccine will give you some limited protection from the virus. In the process, the very definition of “vaccine” has been changed. Never fear, the Ministry of Truth is hard at work to make you forget that.

Social distancing. Stores across the country had stripes on the floor six feet apart to identify how close we could be to other people. To date, no evidence has been produced to substantiate that six feet is anything other than an arbitrary number (Six-Foot Social Distancing Is on the Way out, but How We Got There in the First Place Is the Real Story).

Super-spreader events. We were warned about them. None have been identified to date (As the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally Begins the Same Tired People Make the Same Tired Apocalyptic Claims That It Is a ‘Superspreader’ Event). Last year’s Super Bowl was not one (Super Bowl Was Not a ‘Superspreader’ Event, Creating a Sad in the Pandemic Porn Industry), this year’s Super Bowl won’t be one, either.

This is just a partial list. I’m sure you can come up with a lot more.

What makes this all more curious is that the windsock constancy of the information is married with a deliberate attempt to quash competing or even neutral information.

The government and its social media lackeys have spent an extraordinary amount of energy suppressing “misinformation” about the virus even though much of the “misinformation” has been proven correct. In fact, we now know that the “scientists” leading the national COVID response, primarily NIH Director Francis Collins and NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, coordinated a campaign to discredit and professionally malign accomplished scientists who disagreed with the direction the US government was going.

The “with” versus “from” dodge. From the very beginning, public health officials have taken heroic efforts to ensure that no one can conduct an independent analysis of what is going on with the “pandemic.” The central feature of this is the deliberate obscuring of the numbers of people who have died or been hospitalized “with” COVID that is, they meet the flabby federal guidelines for classifying a case as COVID or “from” COVID, meaning that COVID was the proximate cause of death or hospitalization. This has resulted in deaths from gangland shootings, car accidents, and drug overdoses being classified as “from” COVID. The current reimbursement scheme for hospitals encourages to classify patients as having COVID because they are compensated at a higher rate for regular and ICU admissions “with” COVID. This all serves to make it virtually impossible to independently verify the severity of the “pandemic” because the best data to evaluate the “pandemic” do not portray the direct impact of the disease.

This leads us to one of two explanations. Either we are ruled by f***ing idiots, and, as you know, I’m open to that argument (PODCAST: Moore to the Point With Susie Moore – Ep. 5 – Conversation With Streiff on Elite Incompetence), or we are seeing a concerted effort by our self-declared elites to eliminate all public resistance to doing what they are told.

If you’ve followed my writing on this subject, you know that I’ve long contended that there are two things at work in the “pandemic” response. The first is that the aggrandizement of power by a voracious bureaucracy. The bureaucracy has tried, successfully in many places, to create a “public health” exception to the US Constitution. The exception is aimed primarily at the First Amendment but it has expanded to include acting as a shadow legislature to impose rules and penalties for non-compliance without legislative action.

The second purpose is population control. It is in the service of the second objective that I contend the non-stop dissemination of false, contradictory, and misleading information by the government, a la 1984, works. The people making these policies, in my view, don’t really care if they are effective or not. They only care that you obey them. From this standpoint, Fauci’s no-mask-one-mask-two-mask tap dance is much more effective than a firm science-based policy (i.e. masks are dumb) proclaimed on Day One. It forces his loyalists to forfeit any semblance of intellectual coherence to support his pronouncements.

The vaccine announcements fall into the same category. Only a year ago, we were told by the government that a vaccine would enable us to get back to normal. That, obviously, has not happened. In fact, we are now looking at being required to take booster shots, in some cases three or four times a year, to maintain even the current definition of vaccination efficacy. The people who mindlessly crowed the “one vaccine” message have now morphed, shamelessly, to mouth the “booster” message.

Bottom line: I am more inclined to believe the self-anointed elites are evil than stupid. A small number of mistakes and minor dishonesty is the price you pay for dealing with people. Massive, uncorrected mistakes, frequently contradicted within a few weeks by the same agency and without any semblance of apology and explanation coupled with the harnessing of government and social media to suppress information speaks of something much more sinister and premeditated. Taken together, the actions by that part of the government making public health policy over the past two years gives one the right to ask that if they were focused on destroying liberty rather than saving lives what would they have done differently?

These happenings over the past two years bring to mind George Orwell’s prescient novel 1984.

One of the key plotlines in 1984 is that the government routinely changes facts and compels the population to go along with the changed facts or face punishment. At one point, the government holds a mandatory 15 days to slow the spread rally where the crowd is informed in quick succession that Oceania is no longer at war with Eurasia. The new enemy is Eastasia and Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. The government’s philosophy was, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

The production of contradictory information is not seen as a fault by the government of Big Brother, rather it is a means of exerting social control. Internalizing and believing what the government said was required if you were to live a life free from punishment.

We’re seeing a page ripped out of 1984 and applied to our society. Once they’ve signed on to repeating the government mantra du jour and bullying family members, associates, and random strangers (or, in Canda, Australia, and most of Europe, reporting them to law enforcement) to force compliance there is no going back.  Their lack of integrity and principles is reinforced and rewarded by government propaganda and by fewer restrictions on their lives. They have become modern-day Kapos and Sonderkommandos. They have become the regime’s enforcers and informers amplifying the reach and power of the government into every home, school, business, and relationship.