I am not a medical expert. But when COVID emerged, I had two people depending on me who I could not send into a hospital alone: my Mom, who had dementia and panicked when left alone, and my husband, who had severe lung problems. So I did a LOT of research in those early days. Most of it remains undocumented, because I’m not an expert - I was just looking for what would help. Some of the things I saw started to worry me.
Early on, I signed the Great Barrington Declaration because it made sense to me. I had a high-risk spouse, so I had to stay home. But most other people didn’t. Why would college students need to be locked down? Or children, who had already been established to be at low risk from COVID? Couldn’t they be going out and acquiring the “herd immunity” needed to end this?
I looked at home and herbal remedies. There were links to studies that were forming. Hydroxychloroquine? Z-pack? Zinc and quercetin? Vitamin D? I stocked up on vitamins and herbs. Things started to get weird in March 2020. But I still had faith that those “at the top” would keep things at least somewhat sane.
Boy was I wrong.
It started with the outpatient treatments and home remedies. WHY we were not supposed to have treatments for this illness before hospitalization was never explained. The media were spreading stories about a woman poisoning her husband with “fish tank cleaner”, which she supposedly mistook as hydroxychloroquine.
And Dr Anthony Fauci was calling any results from hydroxychloroquine “anecdotal” evidence, which is Doctor-speak for “we haven’t seen the studies”. And it should not mean that doctors who are seeing results shouldn’t share them.
I was confounded until someone sent me a link to studies that were forming. The study on hydroxychloroquine would be using 2000 MG Vitamin C as a placebo. I did know that placebos in medical studies were not always inert, if specific results were desired. It was obvious to me that the study was looking to minimize the proof of efficacy. So that when they HAD the studies….
By the end of July, Fauci was saying that “the Science” shows hydroxychloroquine isn’t effective in treating Coronavirus. But we already had verbal approval in April from Dr Fauci for Remdesivir, the experimental Ebola drug, which was far more dangerous for patients. And far more expensive, at about $500 a vial, versus less than a dollar a tablet for generic hydroxychloroquine.
Then there were the lockdowns. In Fauci’s emails, Stanford professor Jay Battacharya became a “fringe epidemiologist” who wanted to “let it rip”. But apparently we needed to follow the Chinese (and now Italian) model.
This is where things got scary. Not the name-calling, not even the “two weeks to slow the spread”. It was realizing the extent of the collusion between Fauci and the media to smear anyone who dissented from his directives. The few people calling for sanity were being harassed and even suspended from social media. Seeing almost everyone I knew following these directives into dangerous behaviors was something I never expected.
It started with the “fish tank cleaner” stories, the arrest of lone paddle boarders, the forcing of masks on toddlers (when Fauci himself had previously stated that masks didn’t help). As things went on, the smearing spread to Ivermectin, a Nobel Prize-winning medicine that was reduced to “horse paste” because it might or might not be effective, but we couldn’t have dissenting information while we waited for a vaccine.
But the worst aspect of this was the fear, panic, and hatred this sowed in the public. Some of my neighbors got into fisticuffs over mask wearing. Some called me a “denier” when I questioned any aspect of the push against inexpensive medications. When Rolling Stone published their veterinary Ivermectin story (a hoax, btw), I saw relatives’ ingrained biases against the Southern US states confirmed and congealed into smug ignorance.
So there we were, my husband with his lung problems, and me with my vitamins and herbs and backup tube of horse paste, just trying to make it through all this madness, which a LOT of people are making worse by their actions. I suspect there were a lot of people like us. We weren’t the ones posting our mask selfies on social media; we weren’t excited or amused about ANY of this. We SAW how crazy it was and how crazy the people were.
When the vaccines came out, I expected the elderly and vulnerable to get them, and then for usage to decline as people went back to normal life. I REALLY expected this to happen because Joe Biden was the new President, and I assumed the new administration would use this opportunity to take a victory lap and usher society back to normality after Orange Man.
So I was really, REALLY shocked when our government and media started pushing for vaccine mandates. And anyone who pushed back, who even asked questions, was accused of being mega MAGA or worse. Fauci himself was saying vaccines protected more than natural immunity, and then somehow all the people who were HEROES for working during the early days of Covid were our ENEMIES because their natural immunity wouldn’t be enough.
Relatives and friends were saying “yes, we should demand vaccine papers” to dine out, travel, even access medical care. Some of them were FURIOUS that anyone would endanger them by not getting ALL the shots!
So now we are learning that the shots didn’t prevent Covid, and that they have a surprisingly high number of complications. And that Fauci’s own diary account is full of lies. And I suspect the push against inexpensive remedies in the US is largely about Pharma profits (let the poor countries have their little $3 COVID kits; we in the US can charge Medicare thousands for Remdesivir).
But that’s not what I’m most worried about in the future.
It’s that so many of my friends and relatives fell for it. The media, led by Fauci, were herding them along. “I am The Science!” he said, and they demanded we trust him, and The Science. And mocked anyone who questioned how things might be done. Now many of them will just say “We did what we had to do”. Except we didn’t.
Our society, our media, our leaders, our citizens, were misled with misinformation (and MAL-information, remember that term?) into horrible attitudes, policies, and behaviors.
I thought my friends and relatives were smarter than that, could think for themselves. I was wrong, very wrong.
Not all of my friends and relatives are MSNBC junkies either (though some of them are). Many of them get their news from The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, PBS, and NPR. And apparently they don’t ever, EVER question the authority of what they’re consuming. And we need to face that.
Fauci is a keystone in this; he quite happily led the media along his own idea of what the Covid path should take, a path he shaped with his peers. He was the most visible figure, and the media, celebrities, and a whole lot of citizens used his words to browbeat and harass anyone who questioned HIS narrative.
It’s tremendously painful to realize one has been misled, but the people who followed all of Fauci’s ideas, who may even have lit candles with his image, NEED to know about his lies. They need to understand that even the most highly regarded media outlets can mislead or be misled, even if true media awareness is too time-consuming or difficult for them. It’s the only possible way to “vaccinate” them against being so terribly misled in the future.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
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