At the conclusion of Bull’s graveside memorial service, his fellow fighter pilot, Col. Virgil Hedgepath, concisely eulogizes his larger-than-life colleague by saying, “I’ll like the world less without Bull. It’ll be a duller, more colorless place.”

After seeing how so many people have overreacted during the pandemic, I’ll also like the world less: Canada, Australia, New Zealand and much of Europe, but especially the US, because I’ve seen American Coronamania up close. I say this sincerely and literally, without intending any of Col. Hedgepath’s tribute.

Many Americans have shown that they’re gullible group-thinkers who lack critical thinking skills.

It was obviously scientifically unsound to begin, even for “for two weeks,” locking down hundreds of millions of healthy people—for the first time in history—in response to a respiratory virus, to mask an entire population, to test, on a mass scale, healthy people—with a method that delivered 90% false positives—and to require young, healthy people to take unnecessary, often damaging shots, when the virus threatened only a small, clearly identifiable, older, unhealthier slice of the population.

The media’s fearmongering and the internal inconsistencies, arbitrariness and cynical opportunism of the government’s lockdowns, masks, testing and “vaccine” edicts couldn’t have been more obvious. Some, like me, said so. But a majority embraced and aggressively promoted this lunacy.

Many Americans are mentally ill.

Many Americans are detached from reality. It was clear in March, 2020 that over 99.7% of Americans under 65 were at no risk of Coronavirus-driven death. Yet, many irrationally supported closing down society, hid behind leaky masks, obsessively washed their hands well after the surface spread myth had been debunked, ordered groceries, elatedly posted Facebook photos of cards showing that they took unneeded, experimental injections, and hectored everyone else to inject. A previously veiled epidemic of American mental illness has been laid bare. Residual mask-wearing likely correlates with, and reveals, the 20% of Americans who’ve been swallowing tons of antidepressants and/or anti-anxiety meds for the past several decades.

Per Psychologist Mattias Desmet, mass psychosis swept the US, Canada and Europe because many people lacked a life purpose and close social connections. Coronamania gave them a cause in which to believe and an anti-virus tribe to which to belong.

Americans didn’t consider that restructuring daily life and the economy to placate the mentally ill is not ultimately doing that cohort, or the society at large, a favor. We can feel sorry for the mentally ill, but sane adults should govern.

Americans have no tolerance for rational discourse.

I could find no one who would engage in a sustained discussion in which they would justify their pro-lockdown, pro-mask, pro-injection position by answering basic questions while citing basic facts. This absence of inquiry and the brainwashed intolerance for dialogue enabled and sustained Coronamania.

This should be the new American lawn sign: “Debate Has No Home Here.”

Most Americans can’t withstand peer pressure.

Many who perceived Coronamania’s disconnection from reality withheld their opinion because they were afraid of being disliked. The desire for social approval shapes liberal behavior. The Emperors—Fauci, Birx and their cronies—clearly Wore No Clothes but zero liberals were willing to say so; it was the worst instance of groupthink in history. The “progressive” mob cheered smug fools like Colbert and Kimmel—who haughtily promoted the harmful shots—because they were afraid that their peers might cast a side-eye at them if they had the temerity to question the pop culture narrative. Many Americans are sheep with a mean streak.

Coronamania has shown, once again, that the minority is often right. Most Americans supported the lockdowns, masks, tests and vaxxes. None of these measures has helped. Each has caused much harm.

Americans are headline readers of cheesy and plainly biased news sources, and they readily internalize slogans and labels.

Most Americans derive their mistaken worldviews from Twitter, YahooNews, GoogleNews, HuffPost, TV network news, the NY Times, CNN and NPR. During Coronamania, they have trusted these absurdly biased fearmongers and ignored what their own eyes should have told them. Many bought the “Crush the Curve” and “We’re all in this together” propaganda. Further, they believed in the shots simply because they were called “vaccines” and were hyped as “safe and effective.”

Many still uncritically believe the litany of media-fed Coronamania lies. They naively assume that because someone appears on a screen under the aegis of some media brand, they’re telling the truth.

Americans are virtue signalers.

We’ve become a culture in which being “nice” means acting as if you care about people when you really don’t. Doing so enables people to feel better about themselves.

Americans like to think they’re helping others, as long as it doesn’t inconvenience themselves. For example, many who professed to care about old people have seldom visited them in nursing homes.

Throughout Coronamania, the virtue signalers didn’t consider the costs to other peopleof the WEF Lockdowns, Mask Theater, Testfest or Vaxx-a-thon. Laptoppers didn’t care what lockdowns and vaxx mandates did to blue collar workers, business owners or people trying to find work or have a social life.

They probably never knew that the Covid response has directly cost the government over $50,000 per family; far more, even adjusted for inflation, than the cost of America’s involvement in World War II. The respective returns on investment are not comparable.

Today’s young people, afraid of a virus, would have cowered in fear of the Nazis and Japanese; if the young people of the 1940s had a 2020 mindset, Europe. Asia and America would have easily been conquered. If 18th Century Americas were as timid as today’s Americans, British monarchs would still rule us. Invading Normandy during WWII or battling barefoot in the snow during the Revolutionary War? No way. Somebody might get hurt or sick, or even die. Those who fought in such wars were much younger, had many more vital years to lose and were far more likely to die than were those infected with SARS-Cov2.

Many Americans are politically tribal demagogues and closet authoritarians.

Not only did the majority demonstrate an unawareness of science and risk assessment and a child-like faith in government and media; they vilified those who saw that Coronamania was a politically opportunistic scam. The media also aggressively censored Scamdemic critics in order to justify such chicanery as mail-in voting and vaxx passports. Coronamania exposed the “liberal” drive to control other people.

Democrat pols and partisans exploited the fear and latent authoritarianism of their rank and file. We who perceived the lockdown, mask, testing and vaxx scams won’t forget that many labeled us “Grandma Killers,” stole irreplaceable experiences from America’s youth in order to win an election and sought to take away the livelihoods of those who sensibly refused to inject.

Americans arrogantly and foolishly think humans can control everything, including the transmission of a submicroscopic airborne virus, the likes of which have always existed.

How many lockdown supporters could have explained the underlying rationale for lockdowns? Did they think that a virus would simply get frustrated at being walled off from humans and permanently vanish into the ether? It made no sense. But neither the bought media nor most people ever asked such basic questions.

Americans have an abiding, misplaced faith in anything medical.

Med/Pharma is the dominant American religion; Americans believe in it more fervently than they believe in God. Med/Pharma is far better funded than all of the US churches, mosques, synagogues and temples combined. Med/Pharma endlessly dips its big bucket into a vast, deep river of dollars derived from medical insurance and massive government subsidies.

With its over-reliance on ventilators and ineffective anti-virals and its suppression of simpler, more effective and affordable remedies, the medical industry mismanaged the Covid response. Covid was simple-mindedly seen as only a medical problem; the social, psychological and economic effects of the Coronamania “public health” interventions were ignored. Americans, including Trump, foolishly trusted a small group of highly overrated, narrowly focused, politically motivated, fame-tripping MDs to govern, and transmogrify, a germophobic nation.

American wealth often does not reflect skill or hard work.

The Scamdemic economy has been a clear example of crony capitalism and overspending on medical testing and treatments. The test administrators and vaxx manufacturers and distributors, and the media that promoted the vaxxes, made tens of billions of dollars without taking any risks, because the government funded vaxx research and promotion/coercion. Ultimately, the vaxx developers demonstrated no special skill. The jabs have already failed and appear to have caused many deaths and other injuries. The worst effects are likely yet to come.

Moreover, Net retailers and big box stores have profited wildly as small, independent merchants were shut down. Government workers, including teachers, stayed home for a year or two. Not only were they fully paid, they also accrued pension credits.

Americans are passive and conflict-averse.

Many Americans believed the government because, well, they were the government, and were therefore official and legitimate. Because bureaucrats wore business attire— plus scarves—and stood behind seal-bearing podiums, people thought the bureaucrats wouldn’t lie; but they did lie, repeatedly. The Faucist clown show continues, with the Misinformer-in-Chief now ludicrously crusading against “misinformation,” at least when he’s not too sick—after being quadruple-jabbed and double-Paxlovid-ed—to appear in public.

Some citizens were astute enough to detect the lockdowns’ and shots’ craziness but were too timid to protest. Too few workers were willing to use their bargaining power and tell their employers that they wouldn’t inject an experimental substance to thwart an illness that did not threaten them. If only 20% of people in a given line of work had stood their anti-jab ground, the mandaters would have been defeated and humiliated.

Americans are terrified of death, even to the point of wrecking the lives of many others in an ineffective response to a very slight threat to themselves.

Old, unhealthy people sometimes die. It’s how life is. If you weren’t old or unhealthy, Covid presented functionally zero risk. Americans need to stop insincerely acting as if death at any age is unacceptable, acknowledge the challenges that extended old age presents and do the best with their vital years. And lose some weight.

Americans lack basic pattern recognition and an awareness of history or basic science.

Many Americans ignored obvious, early survival statistics showing that the virus only threatened those who were already not long for this world.

Those who trusted the government’s, media’s and Pharma industry’s representations regarding Coronavirus stats or the shots either never knew about or have forgotten such expert-driven misadventures as the Vietnam War, the carb-heavy food pyramid, and the wide array of wonder drugs and wonder chemicals that have caused vast environmental harm and been the subjects of many class-action lawsuits because those substances ended up killing or permanently harming people. Anyone who has paid attention during the past sixty years knows that the “experts” have often been very wrong. The CDC/NIH, et al. deserved none of the deference they received.

Americans have a very short-term orientation and short memories.

They didn’t see the vast harm that the lockdowns, school closures or vaxxes would plainly cause. The Covid overreaction has sharply increased depression, overdoses, weight gain, social division and educational inequality and has caused impoverishing inflation and even starvation abroad. These effects will last indefinitely.

Many Americans will conveniently forget that Coronamania worsened each of these problems. I won’t.

Americans are unwilling to admit they were wrong.

The lockdowns/school closures, masking, testing and vaxxing were all clearly ineffective and deeply damaging. Many who stridently supported these measures are still in denial about these measures’ failure. For example, disregarding very high pre-vaxx survival rates, those who became infected after injecting seem programmed to recite that, without the shots, their illnesses would have turned out much worse.

Others, channeling St. Peter, now, or will soon, falsely deny their prior support for the above-listed interventions. Jersey switching.

Still others are taking refuge in the bankrupt position that no one could have known the lockdowns, masks, tests and shots wouldn’t work and would cause far more harm than good. It was obvious from Day 1 that this would be so.

No one I know has admitted that they were gullible and didn’t rationally evaluate, in March 2020, the Coronavirus response, or that politics or peer pressure muddled their thinking. None has expressed contrition for the vast, deep harm his or her Coronamania complicity caused.

I like America much less than I did 27 months ago. It has been, and will be, hard to take seriously, to trust the judgment or to value the character of, people who have exhibited the traits listed above. On the third Independence Day since Coronamania began, “The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” is another empty slogan.

About the Author

Mark Oshinskie is an attorney, athlete, artist, agricultor, and advocate.

Image by KCB1805 from Pixabay. Article cross-posted from Brownstone Institute.

United States medical history bears out Ayres’s paradox. The biggest increases in US life expectancy occurred early in the Twentieth Century, when people had increasing access to calories and protein, better water and sanitation. Lives lengthened sharply decades before vaccines, antibiotics or nearly any drugs were available, and a century before hospitals merged into corporate Systems.

Incremental American life span increases during the past fifty years reflect far less smoking, safer cars and jobs, cleaner air and less lethal wars more than they reflect medical advances. Books like Ivan Illich’s Medical Nemesis and Daniel Callahan’s Taming the Beloved Beast echo Ayres’s critique. But PBS, CNN, B & N, the NYT, et al. censor such views.

The American medical landscape has changed radically in the forty years since I learned of Ayres’ observation. America spends three times as much, as a percentage of GDP, on medical treatments as it did in the 1960s.

By 2020, America devoted 18% of its GDP to medicine. (By comparison, about 5% goes to the military). Adding the mega-costs of mass testing and vaccines etc., medical expenditures might now approach 20%. Although the US spends more than twice per capita what any other nation spends on medical care, American ranks 46th in life expectancy. US life expectancy has flatlined, despite growing medical spending and broadened medical access via the vaunted Affordable Care Act.

Though medicine’s high-cost and relatively low yield are right in front of anyone who thinks about their medical experiences and those of people they know, most never connect the dots; more medical treatments and spending are continually advocated and applauded. There’s a regressive “if it saves—or even slightly extends—one life” medical zeitgeist/ethic.

As most medical insurance is employer-based, most people don’t notice annual premium increases. Nor do they see the growing slice of tax revenues used to subsidize Med/Pharma. Thus, they continually demand more stuff, like IVF, extremely high-cost drugs, sex changes or psychotherapy, as if these were their right, and free. To say nothing of these treatments’ limited effectiveness.

As all are required to medically insure and to pay taxes, one can’t simply opt out or buy only those medical services that one thinks justify their costs. With massive, guaranteed funding sources, aggregate medical revenues will continue to climb.

Thus, Medical-Industrial-Government Complex has become a Black Hole for today’s wealth. With great money comes great power. The Med/Pharma juggernaut rules the airwaves. Nonexistent until the 1990s, hospital System and drug ads now dominate advertising. By being such big advertisers, Med/Pharma dictates news content. Analysts who point out that lavish medical expenditures don’t yield commensurate public health benefit have small audiences. Med/Pharma critics can’t afford ads.

Medicine has fed Coronamania. The TV news I’ve seen during the past 27 months painted a very skewed picture of reality. The virus has been misrepresented—by the media and government, and by MDs, like Fauci, often posing in white jackets— as a runaway train that’s indiscriminately decimating the American populace. Instead of putting into perspective the virus’s clear demographic risk profile and the very favorable survival odds—even without treatment, at all ages, or promoting various forms of contra-Covid self-care, including weight loss—the media and medical establishment incited universal panic, and promoted counterproductive mass isolation, mass masking, mass testing, and treatment with ventilators and expensive, often harmful anti-virals.

Later, mass injections were added to the “Covid-crushing” armamentarium. While the shots created many billionaires, and greatly enriched other Pfizer and Moderna stockholders, they failed, as Biden and many others had promised, to stop either infection or the spread. All of the many whom I know who have been infected in the past six months were vaxxed.

Many—whose voices are suppressed by mainstream media—observe that the shots have worsened outcomes, by driving the development of variants, weakening or confusing immune systems, and causing serious near-term injuries.

Further, people blindly, ardently believed in the shots simply because they were marketed as “vaccines” by bureaucrats wearing medical garb. Despite the shots’ failure and the failure of other “mitigation” measures like lockdowns, masking and testing, many refuse to concede that Med/Pharma has had much—overwhelmingly negative— influence over the society and economy and public health during Coronamania. Nonetheless, many billions of dollars have been—and are still being—spent to advertise shots that most people don’t want.

The Covid overreaction has to some extent also piggy-backed on TV programs that have, for decades, glorified medicine in TV shows like Dr. Kildare, Marcus Welby, M.D., Medical Center, MASH, Gray’s Anatomy and House. Wearing white coats connotes virtue, just as did wearing white hats in Western movies.

Given the cumulative PR onslaught of the ads and shows, medicine is widely seen as more effective than it is in real life. A few years ago, I heard some woman-in-the-street say, during a TV news clip, “If they make me change my doctor, it will be like losing my right arm.”

Many hold such polar views. Medicine is the new American religion. Given such fervent belief in medicine’s importance and the sense of entitlement regarding expanding medical treatments, government and insurance money is relentlessly overallocated to medicine.

Do these expenditures improve human outcomes? During the first Scrubs episode, resident J.D. complains to his mentor that being a doctor was different than he had envisioned; most of his patients were “old and kind of checked out.” His mentor responds, “That’s Modern Medicine: advances that keep people alive who should have died a long time ago, back when they lost what made them human.”

This largely describes those said to have died with Covid. Most people have disregarded that nearly all who died during the pandemic were old and/or in poor health. Most deaths have always occurred among the old and ill. Occasionally, sitcoms keep it realer than real people do.

Aside from not helping much and misspending resources, and extending misery, medicine can be iatrogenic, i.e., it can cause illness or death. Hospital errors are said to cause from 250,000 to 400,000 American deaths annually. Perhaps medical personnel try to do a good job. but when the bodies of old, sick people are cut open or dosed with strong medicine, stuff happens. Even well-executed surgeries and many medications can worsen health.

Further, though few know it, a brew of excreted medications and diagnostic radionuclides daily pours down drains across the US and world and ends up in streams and rivers. For example, the hormones in widely-prescribed birth control pills feminize and disrupt aquatic creatures’ reproduction. There are books about all of this, too, though such authors never appear on Good Morning America.

Faith in medical interventions also lessens individual and institutional efforts to maintain or improve health. If people didn’t abuse substances, ate better and moved their bodies more, there would be much less demand for medical interventions. And if people spent less time working to pay for medical insurance, they could spend more time taking care of themselves and others. Overall, America could spend a fraction of what it spends on allopathic medicine and yet, be much healthier. There are also plenty of books about this.

Given its place at the center of American life for 27 months, and counting, Covid has been—and will be—used to further intensify the medicalization of individual lives, the economy, and society. By exploiting and building an irrational fear of death, the Medical Industrial Complex will promote the notion that we should double—or triple—down on medical and social interventions and investments that might marginally extend the lives of a small slice of the population. Or, in many instances, shorten lives.

But most people who live sensibly are intrinsically healthy for many years. Given enough nutritious food, clean water and a decent place to sleep, most people will live a long time, with little or no medical treatment. While intensive medical interventions can marginally extend the lives of some old, sick people, medicine can’t reverse aging and it seldom restores vitality.

If the media were honest brokers, the Covid mania would never have taken hold. The media should have repeatedly pointed out that the virus only threatened a small, identifiable segment of a very large population. Instead, captive to its Med/Pharma sponsors, the media went full-frontal fearmonger and promoted intensive, society-wide intervention. Social, psychological and economic catastrophe ensued.

Additionally, many doctors who could have spoken against the Covid craziness stayed silent so as not to jeopardize their licenses, hospital privileges or favored status with Pharma, or just because they were schooled in allopathic orthodoxy and hold fast to that faith. Props to those courageous few who broke ranks.

The Med/Pharma/Gov establishment, including the NIH and CDC, hasn’t saved America during 2020-22. To the contrary, Covid interventions have worsened overall societal outcomes. These net harms should have inflicted—and, depending on longer-term vaxx effects, may yet inflict—a big black eye on the Medical Industrial Complex.

If so, Med/Pharma will spend tens of billions of PR money to distort what’s happened for the past 27 months, and to portray well-paid medical personnel, administrators and bureaucrats as selfless heroes. Many gullible Americans will buy this slick revisionism, including its portrayals of healthy-looking people walking in slow motion on beaches or across meadows in golden light, accompanied by a contemplative solo piano soundtrack.

About the Author

Mark Oshinskie is an attorney, athlete, artist, agricultor, and advocate.

Article cross-posted from Brownstone Institute.