The price of fear

First-person stories of the damage from two years of public health hysteria and useless rules (Vol. 1)

Earlier today on Twitter I asked you for your own stories of how lockdowns and travel restrictions and vaccine mandates have touched your lives.

So many of you have emailed already, and I must admit that the intimacy of these stories stuns me. Some of my closest friends are friends no longer, so I understand your sense of loss firsthand.

Still, the raw pain and in some cases open bewilderment in these stories is stunning. Marriages torn apart, grandparents who will no longer see their grandchildren, kids with special needs ruined.

Giving these a proper hearing means running them at some length, which means I can only run a couple at a time. I’ll run them from time to time, grouped by subject.

Tonight, marriages:

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On a post-vaccination miscarriage and the pain that followed (warning, this is particularly dark):

I had thought she was refusing the shot, and dealing with all of the work-related pressure (wearing a mask in the office and being branded an anti-vaxxer, despite her pregnancy excuse) because she believed what I was telling her.  Ultimately, I came to find out that she would have gotten the shot earlier except for my strong stance against it.

…she received a call from HR.  HR informed her that "someone" has reported her for not wearing a mask despite her unvaxxed status.  She panicked, and following encouragement from vaxxed coworkers, signed up for a shot that evening.  She called me hysterical at about 6pm to tell me she was getting the shot at 6:30pm.  I pleaded with her not to do it, and tried to convey the impact it would have on our relationship, but she went through with it anyway.  

At home, later that evening, she told me that she was not against the shot but had only refrained because of my position.  I felt betrayed that she didn't value what I believe to be one of my greatest strengths and passions, the pursuit of truth.  But it was not until she admitted she would consider shots for our two kids that I became livid, and told her that my kids would only receive the shot over my dead body…

A few days later, the damage got worse when she suffered an awful miscarriage.  It was so bad, and she was bleeding so much that she had to be rushed to the hospital for blood transfusion and D&C.  And I wasn't a big enough person to look past her betrayal to provide any support whatsoever.  I couldn't feign concern because I knew she had brought the miscarriage upon herself. [emphasis added] Rather, I felt for my loss, both of a relationship where my views were considered and valued and of my unborn child.  I let her mom take her to the hospital, when she felt like she was dying, and I tried to leave her later that week in the hospital, after she was stable, but instead agreed to give it another chance.  

I am happy to report that we have worked through some of our issues and now have a happy and healthy third child… but I'll never forget what the mandates took from me: (1) a relationship of unlimited potential with my wife and (2) my unborn child.   

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A marriage, ended over the husband’s refusal to be vaccinated:

The covid pandemic completely wrecked my marriage & drove me out of my 20-year home in California. As someone who has chosen to remain unvaccinated, I watched in horror as those closest to me suddenly stopped allowing me in their homes, uninvited me from holiday gatherings, demanded I take pcr tests before I could see them, and called me selfish (or worse) for simply exercising the bodily autonomy to choose whether to participate in a medical experiment with no long term health data…

At first I tried like hell to wake people in my family up to the clear data & evidence that I foolishly thought would give them critical context & caution. But to my amazement, people who I had loved and cared for suddenly turned on me, treating me as if I had 3 heads or had been brainwashed by “misinformation…”

The final blows came when my wife continued to get more irritated with me for making her family uncomfortable then she cared about her own husband now being ostracized from society, unable to enter a restaurant without a proof of vaccine. I begged her to move out of state, somewhere where I did not face such community hatred & discrimination, but she refused, telling me I would “just have to order take-out from now on.” That was the last straw, and we filed for divorce shortly after.

Since then I have wandered, quite honestly shellshocked at how my entire life & family has burned to the ground…

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And a wedding caught in travel bans:

My wife and I are prevented from having our wedding ceremony due to the ongoing political nonsense in the name of public health. I proposed in December 2019 and we had planned for our wedding to be in November 2020 in the USA. All the plans were made and paid for - venue, Priest, choir, catering, cake, guests, etc. Unfortunately, she is a citizen of the USA, and I am not. We still have not been able to have a wedding to this day, and we are still waiting hopelessly.

In late March 2020, Trump banned all foreign nationals from entering the USA, with some limited exceptions - including spouses of citizens. My fiancee and I were not formally married at this point so when November 2020 came around we had to indefinitely postpone our small wedding celebrations (I recall the full guest list is around 10 people). We got so tired of waiting for something to happen that we performed a civil ceremony in my country in July 2021 just for the sake of paperwork and visas so my fiancee could live with me here.

By this time, Biden had entered office and upheld the ban on foreign travel, but now technically I could travel to the USA with my now civilly-married wife so we could have our ceremony. The only problem was my parents were meant to accompany us to the USA for the ceremony, and they did not count as an exception, so they could not travel. We kept postponing.

In November 2021, the mandates changed to allow all doubly-injected foreign nationals into the country, so (unfortunately) my parents now were capable of going, but I wasn't. We are forced to postpone indefinitely until I am capable of travel to the USA, but it seems that everyone has completely forgotten there is still this restriction on uninjected foreign nationals entering the country.

Sadly in the time we've wasted waiting for the mandates to be undone, my mother has now passed away - she was not able to attend her only child's wedding as a result of these restrictions.

We are getting more hopeless by the day and pray consistently that something can change soon so we can just get on with our lives.