Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives

by Alex Berenson

Doctors sometimes joke that if patients get good medical care, they will recover from the flu in a week. Without help, they’ll need seven days.

I had always thought one big difference between serious reporters and tabloid journalists was that serious reporters understood they had a responsibility to acknowledge when they were wrong. Apparently that distinction no longer existed.

In a 1978 essay called “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag famously wrote, “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

Naturally, the most common self-reported symptom of long Covid is fatigue.9 Which affects approximately all Americans approximately all the time.

As The Onion said in 1998, “Report: Aspirin Taken Daily with Bottle of Bourbon Reduces Awareness of Heart Attacks.”24

This theory ignored the fact that viruses—including coronaviruses—naturally tend to evolve in ways that make them more contagious but less dangerous. Viruses spread most widely when they don’t kill or even severely sicken their hosts.

It also ignored that Sars-Cov-2 could mutate in vaccinated people too—and, if it did, would almost by definition change in ways that made vaccines less effective.

As early as December 4, 2020, Biden had ruled out requiring vaccines. “I don’t think it should be mandatory,” he said. “I wouldn’t demand it to be mandatory.”37

Since they had to admit vaccinated people were becoming ill and dying, the advocates moved the goalposts again.

After almost a year of promising he would not, President Biden decided to mandate vaccines after all.

the world’s top medical journal, saying they did not believe boosters were needed for most people. “The currently available evidence does not show the need for widespread use of booster vaccination,” they wrote.72

I could only imagine how the media would have reacted if Trump had promised boosters before regulators signed off. The rules were different for Biden. The fact that his own regulators had quit in the face of his plan somehow became a curiosity rather than a scandal.

Zero Covid was always a fantasy.

the medical establishment, and especially the federal health bureaucracy, have been bizarrely reluctant to consider or test older and cheaper drugs.