Five years later, lefty journalists and health bureaucrats are lying worse than ever about Covid

Only two facts matter: the virus's risk was tiny for anyone who wasn't already very sick, so lockdowns were a terrible idea; and the vaccines made no difference to the course of the epidemic.

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The left wants you to forget what happened in 2020.

I don’t mean Covid. As today’s drumbeat of “Five Years Later” stories proves, woke reporters don’t want you to forget Covid — or how scared you were of the virus back then. In fact, they’re annoyed you’ve “rewritten history” and forgotten your fear.

But of course you’ve forgotten that fear. Because you know the truth. In July 2021, as the relentlessly grinding American Covid death clocks passed 600,000, I wrote one of the truest, cruelest sentences of my career:

I’m just going to say it: 600,000 deaths has never looked more like zero.

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(The truth, without fear or favor. Then, now, always.)

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Six hundred thousand deaths has never looked more like zero.

True then. Truer now. The reason isn’t just that Covid had an initial infection fatality rate of 0.3 percent (maybe less), meaning that on its first pass it would kill about 1 in 300 people who got it.¹ The reason is that more than the flu — and far more than the panickers will admit even now — Covid targeted the very old and the very sick.

I’ll never forget asking my doctor how many of his patients had died of Covid. He has since retired, but at the time he was in his eighties. Given his age and the fact he was in New York City, I assumed he’d have lost a half-dozen or more. The answer was one, a guy in his nineties.

Yes, the death of (almost) any human being is a tragedy.

But that sad, true, banal fact does not mean society must do anything and everything it can to prevent every death. Everyone dies, sooner or later. Pretending we can undo that reality, like pretending we can make pain disappear, is not merely false but wrongheaded. It inevitably produces perverse and wretched outcomes. Pain and death are our portion as human beings. We can not make them vanish, only delay them a bit, if we’re lucky. We are not gods, and we are surely not God.

But politicians (and doctors) sometimes like to think they are. If everything we do saves just one life, I'll be happy, Governor Andrew Cuomo famously said on March 20, 2020, as he signed the executive order that locked down New York.

No. Like all leaders, Cuomo’s job was far smaller, though more complicated; not to wave a wand and make death vanish, but to balance the interests of the healthy and the sick, the young and the old.

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By mid-March 2020, even as the panic was only starting, the scientists with the best access to the data — in particular from the Diamond Princess cruise ship quarantined in Yokohama, just outside Tokyo — knew how age-stratified Covid’s risks were.

Maybe the reports from China could not be trusted, but the Japanese and Italian figures could. They unequivocally showed that the illness was far more dangerous to people over 75, even 80, than anyone else.

The rest of us needed a few more days to understand this truth. But by the end of March, it was obvious to anyone paying attention.

As I wrote in PANDEMIA (and, honestly, if you want to remember that first year, you really should pick up a copy of PANDEMIA if you haven’t already read it), New York City’s proved the opposite of what the media claimed.

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New York had everything going against it — very high density, apartments and subways to produce rapid spread, a stressed municipal hospital system, an unhealthy population — and yet the coronavirus did NOT (Sorry, edited to add “not”) overrun its hospitals. The city’s high death rates that first month probably had more to do with an overreliance on ventilators and panic at badly run nursing homes than anything else.

By late April 2020, the medical crisis was over. The field hospitals closed and the hospital ships sailed away. The new ventilators, only just arriving, were sent to warehouses; they would be mothballed without ever being used.

And yet.

For the media and the public health bureaucrats, the Covid panic was only just beginning.

Why?

Because they had seen how useful it could be.

It was a way to attack Donald Trump and excuse Joe Biden’s infirmities and inability to campaign. But it was even more than that. It was a way to remake society, to rebuild the United States along the lines of Europe, to empower the welfare state as never before, to make real the great communitarian dreams of universal health care (in the United States) and Universal Basic Income (everywhere).

Think I’m exaggerating?

I’m not exaggerating.

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(Globalists unite! You have nothing to lose but your passports!)

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Those are the lies the progressives in and out of the media want you to forget today — the dreams they had that they couldn’t make real, the way they tried to use the crisis to stampede policies they could never have pushed through otherwise.

They failed, of course. Worse than failed. In overreaching, they did themselves inestimable harm.

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(The truth still matters! Get yours today.)

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All over the United States and Europe, citizens saw the dangers of a too-powerful nanny state and public health authoritarianism. In some places, like Florida, they understood quickly. In others, like Canada, it took longer.

But eventually everyone got Covid — and almost everyone recovered. And we all saw the only thing we had to fear was the public health establishment itself.

I am convinced that an almost subconscious anger over the lockdowns and the lies of 2020 is still driving our politics today. And if you think I’m wrong, look to the Oval Office. The progressive academic/media/Hollywood blob thought Covid would end Donald Trump.

Turned out to be the other way around.

(PART ONE OF TWO)

1. The rate fell over time, in part because the virus adapted to become more transmissible and less lethal, in part because our bodies adapted to fight repeated infections, and in part because viruses generally pick off the most vulnerable people first. That’s in part because their bodies can’t respond and in part because vulnerable people tend to be more exposed to quickly spreading waves of infection because they live in what doctors call “congregate settings” - hospitals or nursing homes. None of this is news to epidemiologists, they just conveniently forgot it early in Covid as they tried to spread panic.