Gaslighting the end of COVID

There was no newsletter last week. I’m sorry. I’ve been working on a longer piece that pulls together everything I have been thinking lately about COVID and it just won’t come together. Partially because it’s hard, sad stuff to think about so I keep finding distractions. And partially because the line between conspiracy-crazed tinfoil hattery and critical analysis of things that nobody wants to think about is very, very thin.

This week I’m offering you a list of the things I am trying to bring together in my grand essay of everything. I would welcome criticism, input, suggestions - anything that will help me share this into something coherent and useful. I’ll present it in two parts, because it’s a lot to process all at once (thus my writer’s block.)

Here are my first pieces:

1. The idea of gaslighting. I started this newsletter because I felt gaslit by my own government about the state of the COVID epidemic. I felt that way when CDC stopped sharing actual transmission numbers with us and I still feel that way - I feel that way even more after President Biden told us all the pandemic was over.

2. President Biden told us that the pandemic was over, and you can tell because no one is wearing masks. Here’s NPR with the quote “The pandemic is over, we still have a problem with COVID. We're still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one's wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape, and so I think it's changing, and I think [the Detroit auto show resuming after three years] is a perfect example of it.”

3. Now, I am 100% certain that President Biden wasn’t trying to blame people in masks for causing the pandemic. But if you look at his words from a certain angle, it sure does sound like it. There is no pandemic because people aren’t wearing masks. Therefore, if people ARE wearing masks, there is a pandemic. Is that a cause of the pandemic or an effect of it? We don’t talk about Bruno, after all.

4. The COVID pandemic is slowly getting better. Looking at the global numbers, things are in fact improving. They’re improving much more slowly in the US, but they are improving. I agree with the Director General of the WHO: the end if in sight. But it’s not here now, and if we don’t keep up our anti-COVID work that end could slip away from us.

Also, things I have been reading lately about COVID:

The People’s CDC COVID Weather Report

The Lancet commission’s report on global COVID response

Anti-science quackery can almost always be traced to someone making money. This time it was the bleach cure.

We are not in this together

COVID Hasn’t Been Defeated, But Effective Public Health Measures Have Been

What happened to Australian COVID response?

COVID and Global Mental Health

Stop Telling Americans That They’re “Tired of Covid”