With Apologies to Heather Heyring.
Do you dare to share? Here's a list of pandemic related conspiracy theories that turned out to be predictions that were true. Did you cancel somebody from your family over one or more of them? Perhaps it is time to apologize and create a new bridge. Rest of post is from Heather Heying, with a couple of links to her content.
Consider these ideas, and who knows what could happen.
Early in the pandemic we thought that masks were broadly effective. We were wrong. First, we
spoke about the importance of masks, and as new evidence came in, our position changed. We spoke about that, too.
We also thought that short, early, and strong lockdowns had a chance of stopping the spread of SARS-CoV2. We were wrong about that. I don’t think lockdowns could have worked, in part because I don’t think sufficient worldwide compliance was possible to stop the spread. And as much as I am disappointed to have landed here: I no longer trust my government to borrow any of my freedoms.
Even when physical distancing made sense to slow the spread of disease, social distancing never did. Social distancing tore families apart. People died alone. Children and teenagers lost their way; some of them lost their lives. We became inhumane to one another.
Wearing masks outside was never a good idea (we understood this even when we still thought that being masked indoors in public spaces was protective).
Keeping people inside was a huge error. Closing parks and beaches, forests and playgrounds, was a mistake. Everyone should have been getting outside as much as possible, moving their bodies with enthusiasm and abandon, breathing in the air, letting the sun shine down upon their bare skin.
Vitamin D deficiency was a risk factor for Covid, and getting your D—best if you can do so by letting the sun be on your skin, so that you can make it yourself, but acceptable to get it through supplements—was a very good prophylactic measure, not just against Covid, but against other common illnesses, too.
Having dark skin is a risk factor for Covid, because dark-skinned people are not as efficient at making vitamin D as are light-skinned people. We were of the opinion that talking about this was the opposite of racist.
Speaking of not racist: We also thought that talking about the likely lab origins of SARS-CoV2 was the opposite of racist, as the alternative was blaming the weird habits of exotic Chinese people who buy food at—gasp—outdoor markets. Perhaps my favorite moment in this nuttiness was when Peter Daszak, President of the ironically-named EcoHealth Alliance, blamed the pandemic on the supposed predilection of Chinese people for frozen ferret badger steaks (covered in DarkHorse livestream #67).
Obesity is a comorbidity for Covid, a fact that an intact public health system would have publicized. Instead, the press claimed that mentioning this fact was “fat-shaming,” and mostly succeeded in shutting down the discussion.
There was a lot that you could do to keep yourself healthy as this novel coronavirus scoured the Earth. Eat high quality fat and protein. Restrict your consumption of sugar. Drink the nectar of the gods (honey stirred into hot water, before adding the freshly squeezed juice of a lemon). Enjoy onions in abundance. Use a neti pot for nasal irrigation. Supplement with D and C and Zinc and Magnesium if your levels are low, especially during the Winter.
Understanding the origin of SARS-CoV2 is important. This is partly because if it did emerge from gain-of-function research in a lab, we need to have a conversation about why that research continues. But it is also important because the artificial selection that the virus would have gone through in the lab could be used to understand how it would behave in the wild. Many argued that where the virus came from was unimportant, but that argument demonstrates a failure to understand evolution. That’s okay. Most people don’t understand evolution. But the people who don’t understand evolution should not be shutting down the voices of people who do, especially when a quickly evolving pathogen is destroying lives and societies.
Mass vaccinating a population during a pandemic was likely to drive the evolution of new variants, as Geert Vanden Bossche repeatedly and urgently argued.
Organizations including but not limited to the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) were doing honest medicine, honorable medicine, and a public service. We watched as they were repeatedly slandered and slammed.
Covid is an unusual and nasty disease, and not to be taken lightly. We wondered whether those who had facilitated its creation and unleashed it on the world would ever be held to account.
Immunity acquired from having had the disease is at least as good as the immunity acquired from getting a vaccine. We found it suspect that the idea of “natural immunity”—which, after all, our immune systems have been working on for hundreds of millions of years—was now considered a conspiracy theory. Where’s the conspiracy—between B cells and T cells? Or was the problem that we were talking about any way forward that didn’t include pharma’s solution?
“These newly developed vaccines are safe” was a tell. There was no way for anyone to know that they were safe—not enough time had passed to know. Even if they had turned out to be safe—and we all wish that they had—nobody could possibly have known that less than a year after they were developed. We thought that being blatantly lied to by public health authorities was sufficient reason to even more carefully consider all of their pronouncements going forward.
When it still seemed that the vaccines might turn out to be safe and effective for a lot of people, we nevertheless understood it to be a bad idea to give them to children, or to pregnant or breast-feeding women. Children are at the lowest risk from Covid, and at the highest risk from the vaccines. Functioning societies do not put children at risk to protect the old.
Vaccine mandates were a very bad idea. People being fired or kept out of school for not accepting an experimental treatment was anti-democratic. We applauded the courage of the Canadians who stood up to tyranny and said no, including the truckers who early in the pandemic had been celebrated as heroes but were now being called every epithet under the sun. The truckers’ convoy was a joyous coming together, and we wished that we could have been there. We could not, as we were not vaccinated, and crossing the border between the United States and Canada was not allowed if you were dirty and unvaccinated. Similarly terrible policies persist to this day.
The governments of many Western countries, including especially the mostly English speaking worlds of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, instituted policies that were damnably anti-democratic, anti-scientific, and authoritarian. We thought with some grim satisfaction: now we know. Now we know what they are willing to do.
Universities and Hollywood became some of the most eager institutions to enforce vaccine mandates, thus revealing how very anti-intellectual and conformist they have become. Where we should expect creativity, analysis, and a diversity of opinions, instead we have lockstep. It is ironic that these are the very domains that triumphantly embrace pseudo-diversity, in the form of Diversity Equity and Inclusion offices and officers. People are waving metaphorical flags that literally mean the opposite of what they stand for.
Shutting down schools was bad for children, and for society. After the initial confusion in the Spring of 2020, there was no excuse. Putting masks on children was diabolical. Masking children would impair their language and their social development, and make them fearful, just like their parents.
People were manipulated with fear, and then promised relief from their fear if only they would comply. Many complied. But the virus did not go away. People got sick anyway. Their compliance did not achieve the goal they were told it would achieve. Many got injured from the treatment. Many others did not, but quietly decided, nevertheless, not to get any more of the miracle treatment.
We thought that the people who changed their minds should say so publicly. We still do.
In A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, which was published in September 2021 but fully drafted before the pandemic, we wrote the following:
Combine a tendency to engage only proximate questions, with a bias toward reductionism, and you end up with medicine that has blinders on. The view is narrow. Even the great victories of Western medicine—surgery, antibiotics, and vaccines— have been over-extrapolated, applied in many cases where they shouldn’t be. When all you have is a knife, a pill, and a shot, the whole world looks as though it would benefit from being cut and medicated.
