The prolific promotion of COVID policy interventions by the media has unfortunately had astonishing consequences.
There’s been an undeniable surge in mental health issues, with teenagers and children especially affected.
Many spent their remaining years of junior or high school lives stuck locked away by needlessly terrified adults. Others were forced to miss out on the formative years of early education or the start of their time in college.
Vaccine mandates eliminated the once sacred freedom of choice, with the media and expert messaging gaslighting the public into accepting the forced compliance with mandates or be fired as a reasonable, defensible trade off.
Discriminatory policies have and will continue to have long-lasting consequences. Societal disruption, a collapse in economic health and success, and of course, the substantial portion of the population who will never move on from masks and boosters.
I got another COVID booster shot and the pharmacist said, "you're good now, you don't need any more shots" and I'm like, buddy, I'm going to be back every six months to a year until something else kills me, which is the entire point
Media outlets continue to this day to refuse to accept the disturbing consequences of their actions, deciding instead to continuously mislead their readers, with the intellectual implications of their actions seemingly making it impossible for them to ever relent.
But what makes this so much worse is that a growing body of evidence is confirming that none of it was remotely effective. This is despite the information shared by researchers trying desperately to defend mandates.
Their own work, however, is detailed evidence that when comparing states by mask mandates, lockdowns, and even political orientation, there’s no difference. Even when stacking the deck.
‘Public Health’ is Useless
A substantial group of researchers recently published a study on the impact of “COVID-19 pandemic policies and behaviours and their economic and educational trade-offs across US states from Jan 1, 2020, to July 31, 2022.”
What they attempted to do was to compare mandates and behaviors across states to determine the importance of said policies and their connection to COVID outcomes.
Well, sort of.
It is almost immediately apparent where their assumptions lie simply by identifying the primary funder of the study.
“Funding”
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, J Stanton, T Gillespie, J and E Nordstrom, and Bloomberg Philanthropies.”
Ah, there it is.
In their introduction they explain their belief that “the USA has performed poorly” during the pandemic. It continues stating that the country “has captured researchers’ attention for its suboptimal response to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“The cross-state differences in COVID-19 infection and mortality rates suggest that the USA had the capacity to perform better than observed. There were a number of key policy-relevant findings. First, a subset of social and economic inequities were statistically associated with more SARS-CoV-2 infections and worse COVID-19 mortality rates, most notably poverty, lower educational attainment, higher rates of key comorbidities, limited access to quality health-care services, and lower interpersonal trust.”
They imply that the US could have had a better response, based on the relative success of states of like Vermont and Hawaii compared to Mississippi, for example.
But they then undercut that argument by identifying the factors that caused Mississippi to have worse outcomes. Higher poverty rates, lower educational attainment and comorbidities were all associated with more infections and higher death rates.
Those are not pandemic related problems that could be solved with government imposed shutdowns and mask mandates. Vermont, Hawaii and other areas had immense natural advantages, as did other countries. Not because of their weather, population density or political leanings, but because they had higher incomes and healthier populations.
Hawaii’s median household income is roughly $83,000 per year, with Honolulu County coming in at nearly $93,000 per year.
Mississippi, by contrast, has a median household income of $46,511 per year.
Gee, wonder which one did better.
The researchers’ confusion as to the supposed struggles of the US to “contain” the pandemic shows how deeply committed the scientific community is to starting every conversation under the assumption that lockdowns work. That leads to embarrassing “self-owns” like this, where they identify immutable societal characteristics that lead to better outcomes across a country the size of a continent, while simultaneously wondering how it’s possible that the country – with 50 individual governments – didn’t have better, more uniform results.
But suffice it to say, despite clearly operating under the assumption that public health policies and authorities would guide science based states to better performance, even they’re forced to admit that these departments were hopelessly outmatched.
“Higher public health spending and more public health personnel per capita were not associated with infection or death rates,” they write.
Well who could have predicted this, except literally anyone who’s paid attention to public health authorities over the past few years.
Their endless flip flopping, authoritarian impulses, blatant double standards when it came to their withholding the potential risks during the protests of 2020, their endless political posturing, and lack of intellectual humility have been both awe inspiring and undeniably damaging.
No wonder it made absolutely no difference how well funded or staffed public health departments were. Heck, public health is often so laughable that they often don’t even bother staffing medical doctors, choosing instead what amounts to social workers instead.
Even more unsurprising, the measures that public health authorities pressed for the most proved to be exceptionally pointless.
Mandates Don’t Work, Part 200 Million
Perhaps the best indicator of the total uselessness of mask mandates is a map of the United States showing the researchers adjusted comparisons of COVID mortality rates.
Notice how Florida outperformed California after adjustment? Amazing that the strictest lockdowns and most prolific mask mandates were entirely useless compared to the free state of Florida, isn’t it?
It would seem to provide some important conclusions to take away about the importance and effectiveness of mandates, doesn’t it?
Of course, there’s another glaringly obvious conclusion to draw from this graphic: regional factors matter. A lot.
It is clear that Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Tennessee have a lot in common., as do Georgia and South Carolina and most of the Midwest and upper Midwest.
And what do you know, their results are clustered close together.
Again, who could have predicted this?!
Many people did, for example, in huge numbers of charts comparing regions showing that their curves moved in similar patterns.
The actual data behind the map makes it even more obvious.
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