Tag Archives: #Fear

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#COVID19: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!”

Despite a very significant drop in serious COVID-19 cases, the fear-mongers have to ramp up the fear!

We reported, last Friday, on the actual numbers. Using statistics taken from The Philadelphia Inquirer, not exactly an evil reich-wing news source, we did the actual math:

In Pennsylvania, weekly COVID hospital admissions rose from 281 cases on Aug. 5 to 403 cases on Aug. 19, the most recent week for which data are available through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There were 1,453 weekly COVID hospital admissions reported in the same week of August last year, according to the CDC.

Naturally, the Inky didn’t do the math, but we did: 403 cases in 2023 ÷ 1,453 cases the same week last year = 0.27735719201651754989676531314522, or 27.74%. COVID cases serious enough to require hospitalization are just 27.74% of what they were last year! If “In Pennsylvania, weekly COVID hospital admissions rose from 281 cases on Aug. 5 to 403 cases on Aug. 19,” we have to ask: how many people live in Pennsylvania? According to the Census Bureau’s July 1, 2022 population guesstimate, there were 12,972,008 living in the Keystone State. 403 ÷ 12,972,008 = 3.1066894192479683947157602739684e-5. That means that 0.003107%, 3.107 people out of every 100,000, of the state’s population were sick enough with COVID-19 to be hospitalized, and most of those hospitalized will survive.

In the story noting that First Lady Jill Biden tested positive for the Fauxi Flu, we quoted CNN’s report stating that there were “four new hospital admissions for every 100,000 people nationwide in the week ending August 19,” still a pretty low number, and a gross statistic which could mean anything from a range of 3.51 to 4.49 per 100,000. That was poor journalism, and our guess is that, if the number were any significant fraction over 4, CNN would have used that. But, even if it were in the higher end of that range, it’s still a low number.

Yet, once again, we get more media fearmongering! Continue reading →

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You can’t inspire fear forever

We have mentioned, many times before, how the COVID-19 panicdemic — and no, that’s not a typographical error; ‘panic’ is exactly what this has all been about — has promoted fear far more than combatting the virus. Though he was talking about national security rather than the virus, Glenn Greenwald got it absolutely right when he noted the importance of fear to government power:

Fear is crucial for state authority. When the population is filled with it, they will acquiesce to virtually any power the government seeks to acquire in the name of keeping them safe. But when fear is lacking, citizens will crave liberty more than control, and that is when they question official claims and actions. When that starts to happen, when the public feels too secure, institutions of authority will reflexively find new ways to ensure they stay engulfed by fear and thus quiescent.

Even with the panicdemic 2½ years old now, and most people having learned to live with the possibility of COVID-19, we keep seeing the articles stoking fear among the populace. This one is from The Guardian, the left-wing British newspaper:

‘Most have thrown their hands up’: has the US forgotten about Covid?

As Americans go about their daily lives, severely affected Covid patients are wondering if others are moving too quickly from the worst days of the pandemic

by Maya Yang | Friday, August 19, 2022 | 6:00 AM EDT

Despite signs that indicate the latest Covid-19 surge is slowing down, an average of 400 deaths in the US is still reported on a daily basis.

Various mask and social distancing mandates across the country are becoming anything but strictly enforced.

Actually, it’s not that “various mask and social distancing mandates” are not being “strictly enforced,” but that most have been eliminated.

But as Americans and many of their elected officials go about their daily lives, many healthcare professionals still on the frontlines of the pandemic and severely affected Covid-19 patients are left wondering whether the rest of us are moving too quickly from the worst days of the pandemic.

Have we simply forgotten about Covid-19?

At this point, I am reminded of the original pilot episode of Star Trek, “The Cage.” Captain Christopher Pike has become the captive of the Talosians, who have the ability to project extremely lifelike illusions into their captives minds, when he discovers that the Talosians cannot read his mind when it is consumed by extreme rage and hatred. Vina, a human who has been a captive of the Talosians for 18 years, confirms what the Captain has discovered but points out that it really doesn’t matter, because people cannot just keep that up for long.

And thus we have discovered about fear: the human mind gets used to the constant inputs, and people have become so used to the overblown fears pushed by government officials and others that those fears simply don’t take hold any longer.

My wife is a registered nurse, working in a hospital, and yes, she has taken care of COVID patients. Yes, she is vaccinated and boosted, but I have also seen the changes in her behavior. When COVID-19 first arose, and she had a COVID patient, she’d come home, head immediately to the shower, and wouldn’t allow me to pick up her doffed clothes; she would put them in the washing machine herself. Even before the vaccines became available, that behavior slowly lessened, and now it’s entirely gone. She is directly exposed to COVID-positive patients, and then comes home, taking no special precautions with me, or the rest of our family. When our older daughter tested positive for the virus while at Fort Bliss, before being shipped out to the sandbox, she had to isolate for a few days, but none of us bothered with getting tested or anything, nor did any of us feel ill, even though my wife and I had been traveling with her, in a car with the windows rolled up, to take her to Knightdale Army Reserve Center, a ten-hour drive, from which she departed.

Data obtained earlier this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reveals that the rate of new infections has been decreasing, with the country reporting an average of 107,000 new cases a day. This marks a 12% decrease compared to infection rates two weeks ago.

Even though hospital admission rates have been increasing across the US this summer as a result of highly infectious variants, the amount of patients currently hospitalized with Covid-19 has plateaued at 43,000 patients, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

By contrast, more than 160,000 virus-positive patients were hospitalized during last winter’s surge. Nevertheless, the daily average of 400 deaths across the country since spring remain a concerning figure for healthcare officials.

Translation: while cases rose again, they’ve started to fall.

As the pandemic stretches on and vaccines roll out, numerous restrictions are being eased. States have been lifting strict capacity limits and large-scale mask orders while many others are no longer requiring proof of vaccination to travel or to enter dining facilities.

This was happening months ago. Here in the Bluegrass State, the voters of the Commonwealth gave huge majorities to Republicans running against Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) and his draconian orders. One of the first things they did when the legislature returned to session in January of 2021 was to pass laws greatly restricting the Governor’s ’emergency’ authority. Mr Beshear vetoed those bills, and the legislature just as quickly overrode his vetoes. Through various legal maneuvers, the Governor obtained a court order from a highly partisan state judge, holding the new laws in abeyance, but finally, on August 21, 2021, the state Supreme Court finally, finally! put an end to the Governor’s shenanigans.

That was a year ago come this Sunday.

Last week, the CDC issued new guidelines that loosened its recommendations on social distancing and quarantining. Individuals who were exposed to Covid-19 no longer have to quarantine unless they develop symptoms or test positive.

Unvaccinated people who have been exposed should test on the fifth day of exposure and wear a “high-quality mask”. Additionally, the CDC no longer recommends screening asymptomatic individuals who have not had a known exposure to the virus.

“This guidance acknowledges that the pandemic is not over, but also helps us move to a point where Covid-19 no longer severely disrupts our daily lives,” CDC epidemiologist Greta Massetti said in a statement.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what the nattering nabobs of negativism say about the virus, the American people are (mostly) done with fear. Oh, there are a few whiners, like The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz, telling us that she is immunocompromised, and that:

Disabled/medically vulnerable people also live in society. We have to go to work, to the doctor, we have to grocery shop and go to school, we ride the same trains and busses as everyone else. It’s terrifying how many ppl want sick & vulnerable people to die or be locked away

Miss Lorenz’s attempted guilt trip didn’t work, because the American people are done with fear over this. They have seen the economic devastation the lockdowns imposed, they have seen the social consequences of forced separation and masking, and they have seen that, in the end, while the vaccines seem to have the effect of making the disease caused by the virus less severe, neither the vaccines nor masks prevent either the contraction or transmission of the virus.

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Will the next set of #COVID19 restrictions come on November 9th?

As we noted on Saturday, the Editorial Board of The Washington Post do not think that we have been scared of COVID-19 enough. That was an editorial; here comes what passes for a straight news story:

As the BA.5 variant spreads, the risk of coronavirus reinfection grows

By Joel Achenbach | Sunday, July 10, 2022 | 6:00 AM EDT

America has decided the pandemic is over. The coronavirus has other ideas.

The latest omicron offshoot, BA.5, has quickly become dominant in the United States, and thanks to its elusiveness when encountering the human immune system, is driving a wave of cases across the country.

The Post illustrated the article with a photo captioned, “Commuters board the subway in New York, which still requires masks on trains and indoor stations.” There were very few people in the photo visibly wearing masks.

The size of that wave is unclear because most people are testing at home or not testing at all. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the past week has reported a little more than 100,000 new cases a day on average. But infectious-disease experts know that wildly underestimates the true number, which may be as many as a million, said Eric Topol, a professor at Scripps Research who closely tracks pandemic trends.

They know that it “wildly underestimates” the true number? How do they know this?

Many of the at-home COVID tests use your cell phone to read the test data, though apparently not all of them do. I’m waiting for the government to mandate that tests using a smartphone require the phone to send the test results to the government, and to pull from the market at-home tests which do not require a smartphone.

Is that paranoid? Perhaps a little, but the left have shown no concern at all for people’s privacy when it comes to the virus, and a fascistic bent toward requiring people to get vaccinated and wear masks.

I admit it: when I see the name “Topol,” I think of Reb Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof. Orthodox Jewish men traditionally use the honorific Reb to honor their ancestors. Click to enlarge.

Antibodies from vaccines and previous coronavirus infections offer limited protection against BA.5, leading Topol to call it “the worst version of the virus that we’ve seen.”

“The worst version of the virus that we’ve seen”? Well, that’s what the headline on last Thursday’s Post editorial called it, but somehow, someway, this “worst version” has yet to result in significantly more hospitalizations.

Other experts point out that, despite being hit by multiple rounds of ever-more-contagious omicron subvariants, the country has not yet seen a dramatic spike in hospitalizations. About 38,000 people were hospitalized nationally with covid as of Friday, according to data compiled by The Washington Post. That figure has been steadily rising since early March, but remains far below the record 162,000 patients hospitalized with covid in mid-January. The average daily death toll on Friday stood at 329 and has not changed significantly over the past two months.

Let’s do the math: 38,000 ÷ 162,000 = 0.2345679012345679, or 23.46%, slightly less than ¼ of the number of the less contagious BA.1 Omicron variant that was primarily seen last January.

Restrictions and mandates are long gone. Air travel is nearly back to pre-pandemic levels. Political leaders aren’t talking about the virus — it’s virtually a nonissue on the campaign trail. Most people are done with masking, social distancing and the pandemic generally. They’re taking their chances with the virus.

Well, of course. Both Republican and Democratic candidates know that the public are fed up with the restrictions, and have been for a long time now. With the restrictions gone, Republicans have no issue against which to campaign, and the last thing that the Democrats want is to have the voters thinking that they’ll try to reimpose them. I linked that photo of New Yorkers boarding the train; despite the stated restrictions, even liberal New Yorkers aren’t obeying them.

So, what are the credentialed media trying to do here? They know as well as the politicians that the public will simply not obey a reimposition of restrictions, but the media aren’t running for election; they simply have to make certain that their stories don’t negatively affect Democratic candidates in an election that’s just four months away.

But they are setting it up, just in case BA.5 does turn out to be as bad as Dr Topol might have you believe, because if the urban Democrats — it won’t be Republicans, anywhere — try to reimpose restrictions, they’ll have some cover from a media which will say, “See, we told you so!”

Perhaps the next set of restrictions will come on November 9th?

This article was from The Washington Post, but The Philadelphia Inquirer published it as well, and we’ve seen how Philly’s city government, wholly dominated by liberal Democrats, has been very willing to put restrictions on people, though they had to drop the last mandate due to politics.

I don’t expect the Democrats trying to reimpose mandates soon, because the election is approaching, but I will never underestimate their desire to control your life.

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Fear is the career killer

A libertarian styling herself Freckled Liberty on Twitter has been adamantly opposed to taking the COVID-19 vaccine, and mocking, daily, Joe Biden’s statement, “We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated — for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm.” She has been counting down, every day, ‘day 88 of unmasked and unvaxxed “winter of severe illness and death’: still not vaxxed, still not masked, still not ill, still not dead. 💃🏼”

Now it seems that her friends and family won’t attend her wedding ceremony, because they’re just too scared. If her friends and family are vaccinated, and can obviously choose to wear N95 masks if they feel the need, there’s just no need to be fearful, but after almost two years of fear messaging, it seems that a lot of people have internalized it. From The New York Times:

    As Offices Open and Mask Mandates Drop, Some Anxieties Set In

    Using local guidelines, many companies are loosening Covid safety rules, leaving workers to navigate masking and social distancing on their own.

    By Emma Goldberg and Lananh Nguyen | Friday, March 18, 2022

    Employers are embracing a workplace atmosphere reminiscent of prepandemic times — elevators jammed, snack tables brimming, face coverings optional — even as a new subvariant of the Omicron coronavirus spurs concerns about health and safety. Across the country, office occupancy has hit a pandemic high, 40 percent, reached just once before in early December, at the same time that indoor mask mandates drop.

    Also see: William Teach: NY Times Is Super Excited By Things We’ll Keep In Post Pandemic Life

    After several false starts in calling workers back, company leaders now seem eager to press forward. A flurry of return-to-office plans have rolled out in recent weeks, with businesses including American Express, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Microsoft calling some workers back to their desks. Many of those companies followed state and local governments in easing Covid-19 restrictions, arguing that ending mask mandates could make workplaces more pleasant. But some workers, especially those with compromised immunity or unvaccinated children, feel uncomfortable with the rush back to open floor plans.

    “Masks have created a real psychological barrier to getting back to office culture,” said Kathryn Wylde, head of the Partnership for New York City, a business group. “As long as things are going in a positive direction with Covid, I think the relaxation of mandates will work for the vast majority of people. As soon as we see a reversal, I think we’ve got trouble.”

    The Partnership’s January survey of New York City employers found that 38 percent expected to have more than half of their workers back in the office on an average weekday by late March. As employees come back, they’re facing a patchwork of Covid safety protocols. Just one-quarter of U.S. workers are covered by vaccine mandates in the workplace, according to Gallup data from last month.

    This has left many workers to navigate masking on their own, making Covid safety measures a matter of office etiquette rather than protocol. Some have negotiated new remote work arrangements with their bosses as rules have eased, or even left their companies in search of jobs at workplaces that made them feel safer.

It would seem obvious: if a worker is afraid that he will contract the virus, he can voluntarily get vaccinated, as most people are, for free, and he can continue to wear a face mask, even an N-95 mask.

That palpable fear seems almost measurable, given that 38% of NYC employers anticipate having more than half of their office workers at heir desks by the end of March, when that number should be 100% anticipate having 100% of their workers back. If, as the Times stated, just a quarter of workers were covered by vaccine mandates on their jobs, such still doesn’t mean that most workers aren’t vaccinated. From USA Facts:

  • In New York (state), 17,370,136 people or 89% of the state has received at least one dose.
  • Overall, 14,759,477 people or 76% of New York’s population are considered fully vaccinated.
  • Additionally, 6,556,874 people or 34% of New York’s population have received a booster dose.

From the more sensible New York Post:

    When it comes to masking, New Yorkers still choose fear over facts

    By Heather Mac Donald | Saturday, March 19, 2022 | 8:08 AM EDT | Updated: Sunday, March 20, 2022 | 2:45 AM EDT

    Just when you thought the abyss between red-state and blue-state sensibilities could not grow wider comes post-pandemic America to reveal further cleavage.

    Residents of my 34-story Manhattan apartment building are still wearing masks in the elevators, halls and lobby, even though the building’s internally imposed mask mandate has been lifted. At least half of my neighbors in Yorkville wear masks outdoors, even though Gov. Hochul suspended the indoor mask mandate for New York City weeks ago.

    It has always been the case, no matter the rate of indoor transmission, that inhaling a large enough viral dose outdoors to become infected is almost impossible. One might have imagined that even progressives would be ready to say: “Enough of this! We’ll take our chances. Let’s get back to normal life!” But it turns out that many people have a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for fear and risk aversion, especially when linked to control.

    COVID metrics are, from a blue-state perspective, depressingly low when even the New York Times has given up on frontpage crisis-mongering. For weeks, the Times has buried its COVID stories deep in the paper, if it prints them at all, because there is only good news to report. Currently, an average of five people per day are hospitalized with or from COVID in New York City, out of a pre-pandemic population of 8.5 million. That is essentially zero risk. Deaths with or from COVID are too negligible to mention.

We already know that:

  • Vaccination does not prevent a person from contracting or spreading the virus;
  • Vaccination does seem to lessen the severity of the disease if one does contract the virus; and
  • The cloth masks that most people wear do not prevent the transmission of the virus.

It would appear that New Yorkers have learned the first lesson, but not the second or third.

But at some point there will be some obvious results: workers who cower in fear, whether in a masked-up cubicle in the office, or working remotely over Zoom and the internet, are going to get left behind. They will miss out on ‘networking,’ they will miss out on sales and new clients, and they will miss out on promotions. What office business would promote a worker who won’t come in to the office? What business would promote a masked-up employee over one who isn’t hiding his face? What office business can return to normal if its employees refuse to return to normalcy?

Fear, Frank Herbert wrote, is the mind killer, but in business, fear is the career killer.

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The left have internalized the ‘new normal’

As most people just want to get over COVID-19 and the ridiculous restrictions under which governments have put people, some have so internalized the messages of fear that they’ll never get over it.

The image to the right is a screenshot of a tweet by blue-checked Nicole F Carr. You can click on either the link in the previous sentence, or the image itself, to get to the original.

The obvious answer to her question is: producers want to be able to show their Christmas movies in more than just this year, and Christmas movies aren’t supposed to be downers. They’d like to show this in 2022, 2023, and so on.

But Mrs Carr, whose Twitter biography states that she’s “@ProPublica South covering criminal justice,racial inequity,COVID. @Morehouse journalism professor. 4x Emmy, #WSSU #Newhouse nicole.carr@propublica.org”, is obviously heavily invested in reporting on the virus.

Well, perhaps Mrs Carr really does believe that we’ll all be wearing masks for the rest of our lives, but let’s face facts: mask mandates are being honored in the breach almost every place they can be.

I tweeted a reply:

    Christmas movies aren’t meant just for one year; the producers want to be able to use it again in 2022, 2023, and so on. And let’s face it: Christmas movies aren’t supposed to be downers, and the restrictions are real buzzkills.

    We’d like to get back to our normal lives.

Well, while it’s still there, apparently Mrs Carr didn’t like it, because now there’s this, which wasn’t there previously:

Like so many other lefties on Twitter, Mrs Carr can dish it out, but she just can’t take criticism! I am not surprised.

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Fear is the mind-killer!

William Teach noted New York Times columnist Tom Friedman’s paean to fear:

    When you see how hard it’s been for governments to get their citizens to just put on a mask in stores, or to get vaccinated, to protect themselves, their neighbors and their grandparents from being harmed or killed by Covid-19, how in the world are we going to get big majorities to work together globally and make the lifestyle sacrifices needed to dampen the increasingly destructive effects of global warming — for which there are treatments but no vaccine?

Perhaps, just perhaps, when the plebeians see the patricians taking 118 private jets to the ‘climate summit’ COP26, they simply aren’t convinced that global warming climate change emergency is all that much of an emergency. Whether Mr Friedman took a private jet or, gasp!, flew commercial I do not know, but we do know that he’s been flying all over the globe to attend these things, telling us that he has “been to most of the climate summits since Bali in 2007”.

Yeah, if I could get the Times to pay for a vacation in Bali, I’d go, too!

But Mr Friedman hit upon the instrument of control the government, at all levels, have been trying to use: fear! When he complains that some people are not cooperating with the message that COVID-19 could harm or kill people’s grandparents, neighbors, and themselves, he frets that people, free people, are just not going to go along with the “lifestyle sacrifices” the patricians demand of others, though seemingly not of themselves.

But he needn’t worry: there have been plenty of people who were filled with fear, and are still filled with fear. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

    The catharsis of attending my first concert of the COVID-19 era | Opinion

    I didn’t realize how profoundly being home with only myself and my boyfriend for company had affected me until we started venturing out into the larger world.

    by Rachel Kramer Bussel, For The Inquirer | November 5, 2021

    “Is this your first time?” a stranger asked me in an elevator at the Met as we tried to find our seats at the St. Vincent concert a few weeks ago.

    Stunned, I stared back at her, trying to form an answer. How did she know? Did I look stricken by the nerves I’d felt bouncing around for weeks as I tried to decide if attending a public event was finally safe? I eventually nodded.

    “You have two masks, just like me. It’s my first too,” she said. We both knew she meant it wasn’t our first concert ever, but our first pandemic outing.

    I didn’t realize how profoundly being home with only myself and my boyfriend for company had affected me until we started venturing out into the larger world. For the last few months, we’d been going to a local grocery store to supplement our Instacart deliveries, but beyond that and work interactions, we hadn’t been close to such a large group of people since before the mid-March 2020 lockdown.

There’s a sadness in that: Miss Bussel has just told us that her boyfriend and she had virtually shut down their social lives for nineteen months. For the “last few months” they’d worked up the nerve to venture out to go to the grocery store, apparently when they’d missed putting something on their Instacart order. Of course, they were willing to put other people at whatever risk they were afraid to take themselves, because Instacart requires living human beings to put together the grocery order, and living human beings to drive through Egg Harbor Township[1]Miss Bussel noted in her original that her home is in Egg Harbor, so my noting it does not constitute ‘doxxing.’ to deliver the orders. The stressful social situations Her boyfriend and Miss Bussel avoided themselves they thought little of putting on other people.

    I was expecting to enjoy hearing St. Vincent perform for the first time, but I wasn’t prepared for the sense of catharsis the communal experience would be. I looked around at my fellow concertgoers, at the dazzling chandelier, at the dancers and musicians onstage, and felt deeply grateful that I’d said yes to attending. In August, I’d reluctantly had my boyfriend sell our long-awaited tickets to see Sleater-Kinney and Wilco at the Mann Center, even though that was an outdoor show. The risks felt too great.

    But having received my Pfizer booster shot two days before the St. Vincent show, and knowing the Met requires a COVID-19 vaccination or a recent negative test, I felt that was a risk worth taking.

Uhhh, if Miss Bussel got her COVID-19 booster shot two days prior to attending the concert, it hadn’t had time to work yet![2]“At least 12 days after receipt of the third dose, the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate was 11.3 times lower in the booster group than in the control group (95% confidence interval [CI], 10.4 to … Continue reading

Of course, she was reassured by the fact that other concert goers had to show their papers! Wir müssen Ihre Dokumente sehen![3]Full disclosure: I received my initial dose of the Moderna vaccine on April Fool’s day, and the second on Cinco de Mayo. I’d really liked to have gotten the booster on Veterans’ … Continue reading

The author continued to tell us how she is now facing decisions about what her boyfriend and she can and cannot, should or should not, do to return to a normal life, but I have to wonder: after nineteen months of seemingly abject fear, is it reasonable to think she ever can just turn it off? The ‘experts’ are now telling us that SARS-CoV-2 will be with us forever, though it will become endemic and not be classified as a panicdemic pandemic. Miss Bussel revealed that she has asthma, which could mean that, if she became infected, the disease could be worse for her. Nevertheless, at least to judge from the photo she supplied to the Inquirer, as well as on her website, she’s a fairly young woman, and younger people, while still susceptible, tend to have far less serious outcomes.

Life is full of risks, and COVID-19 is but one of them. Miss Bussel was in about as much danger driving to that concert from a traffic accident as she was of contracting the virus. And since we know that even those who have been vaccinated can contract and spread the virus, going to that concert did not reduce her risk of contracting the virus to zero.

What government, governments at all levels, have done, is to spread fear through our society, fear of contracting a disease which can be deadly, and is deadly in a small percentage of cases, to the extent that it has crippled our society. The American Automobile Association has reported that Thanksgiving travel plans appear to be near pre-pandemic levels, despite Joe Biden’s soaring gasoline prices, but that simply tells us just how much restrictions and fear disrupted Americans’ lives in 2020. Many Governor’s, including Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, issued orders restricting how many people, and from how many households, people could have in their own homes for Thanksgiving last year, orders that I am proud to say the Pico family ignored. For government to have tried to virtually cancel Thanksgiving is something that only induced fear could accomplish.

We must not fear! As Frank Herbert wrote, fear is the mind-killer, but fear is also the freedom killer, the liberty killer! We allowed fear to get people to obey unconstitutional orders from state governors, orders restricting our freedom of religion and freedom of peaceable assembly. When we let fear get us to go along meekly with government diktats that infringe on our individual rights, we enable governments to keep doing so. They only need to instill the next subject of terror and fear to be able to do so.

References

References
↑1 Miss Bussel noted in her original that her home is in Egg Harbor, so my noting it does not constitute ‘doxxing.’
↑2 “At least 12 days after receipt of the third dose, the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate was 11.3 times lower in the booster group than in the control group (95% confidence interval [CI], 10.4 to 12.3), for an absolute difference of 86.6 infections per 100,000 person-days.”
↑3 Full disclosure: I received my initial dose of the Moderna vaccine on April Fool’s day, and the second on Cinco de Mayo. I’d really liked to have gotten the booster on Veterans’ Day, but the county health department would have been closed for the holiday, so I got it on the 9th. It was my choice — well, actually, my wife, a hospital nurse, asked me to do so, because she says she puts me at risk, since she treats COVID patients — but I absotively, posilutely refuse to carry around the vaccination records. I will not comply with “Ve need to see your papers!”
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Fear is the mind killer * Updated! *

We have previously noted how fear is being used to control the population. The government has been spreading fear, and one young lady has given us a very thorough demonstration of how well it has worked:

She posted a series of ten tweets in the thread, which I’ve quoted and linked below, to save space. I have also condensed her two paragraph tweets into single paragraphs.

  1. First tweet: I’m a vaccinated anaesthetist and this is how I shop for my family.
  2. Second tweet: Preparation is key. If possible, I go at quieter times or click and collect if I’m organised. If I need to go in, I have my respirator mask, sanitiser, a list, and the bags which I always forgot pre-pandemic.
  3. Third tweet: Current rules are that maximum one person per household can go each day. We minimise this as much as possible. Either my hubby or I go. Never together. No kids.
  4. Fourth tweet: Once parked I put on my respirator. I’m in healthcare so have a stock of self-purchased N95’s in the car. I take a moment to ensure that it is fitted correctly. No leaks.
  5. Fifth tweet: At the entrance I check in using the QR code the furtherest away from the front door. I sanitise my hands. Big smile with my eyes and thank you to the greeter.
  6. Sixth tweet: Once inside, it’s a race. I assume I have covid. I assume everyone else has covid. I shop with laser sharp focus. No browsing. I avoid crowded aisles. Keep distant. Get only what I need, touch only what is necessary. I don’t squeeze every avocado to see which is ripe….
  7. Seventh tweet: Once I have everything, I pay via self-service usually at the end one if free. I get outta there ASAP. Smile and thank the attendant. Sanitise on exit. Check out via the app. A long shop is 15 mins, usually 7.
  8. Eighth tweet: So why do I do this? Am I outta my mind? I didn’t care about germs before the pandemic. Well, in my job we are all about risk minimisation. I want to protect myself, my family, my patients and my colleagues. I don’t need to spend ages faffing about in there.
  9. Ninth tweet: I don’t want to bring covid into my hospitals. I want to do all I can as an individual to minimise risk. Also, if the supermarket ends up being an exposure site, I don’t want contact tracers to need to trace me and my contacts.
  10. Tenth tweet: Kudos to all the folk doing the right thing, and those working frontline in our supermarkets.

Note that these were tweeted on Saturday, July 24, 2021, not sometime during the summer of 2020.

Of course, everything she has said her husband and she are doing is perfectly legal, and they have every legal right to take the precautions she has mentioned. But this is the second summer — although it’s winter for her, in Australia and New Zealand — of COVID-19, and at some point people have to return to being the social animals that we are.

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Update: 10:03 PM EDT

Naturally, I notified the original tweet author, but it seems that she didn’t like it. When I tried to bring up the tweets again this evening, I got: