This article is inspired by the format often used by Marie Snyder on her blog, which is to quote part of article or (more often) a message thread posted to social media, and comment on that.
The one I want to comment on is this thread: https://twitter.com/StephTaitWrites/status/1683581958939607043, by Stephanie Tait, @StephTaitWrites, a disability activist. But I don’t want to use embedded tweets, because I don’t really trust that the “platform previously known as Twitter” has much of a long-term future. So instead I’ve copied / pasted each tweet as a quote, to which I intersperse comments.
The thread is US-centric, but I think a lot of applies to Canada as well.
I keep trying to tell y’all that there are many hidden layers to creating the ILLUSION that our leaders “moved on” from Covid, in order to convince people it’s over. They still protect themselves, they just hide it so YOU won’t know you need to as well.
What’s lost in this quote format is that she’s commenting on the fact that the White House still has COVID-19 testing protocols in place for everyone who meets with the President. This has caused some consternation for its hypocrisy, since it’s increasingly difficult for Americans in general to get tested before meeting each other…
Lack of ability to get testing is also true—perhaps even more so!—of Canadians. But, I kind of doubt that Canadian politicians are getting people tested around them. Look at how often they seem to get infected! And, it has to be said, most of them are quite a bit younger than Joe Biden.
After repeatedly criticizing Trump for abandoning ppl & refusing to deal with the crisis, they knew they couldn’t be seen doing the same thing.
But they were even MORE concerned about getting ppl “back to normal” before the pandemic had a chance to become a catalyst for change.
Canadian political leadership generally stayed more stable from pandemic start, with most parties that were in power in 2020 then getting re-elected. But, I do believe they were equally motivated to avoid permanently changing policies. For example, although the Federal government did bring in a 10-day sick leave policy for their workers, I don’t think any provinces made a permanent change in that area. And nobody is really doing anything substantive about improving indoor air quality.
So the only way to avoid looking like they were doing the same shit Trump did, WITHOUT having to actually institute the sorts of policies they didn’t want ppl believing were possible, was to throw everything they could at convincing people the crisis isn’t actually happening.
Trump and folks on the right actually had tried the SAME thing, trying to convince people the whole thing was a “scamdemic.”
But they only used methods that targeted THEIR voters, and didn’t care if everyone else saw through it.
Fascism doesn’t plan to need your votes anyways.
What the Democrats doing is so much more insidious. They know they can’t actually afford to be seen callously abandoning people the same way and still get votes. So they have to be much much much smarter about how they push the same lie. “Scamdemic” won’t cut it.
First they told people that once you got the shot you’d never get Covid again. When that lie couldn’t hold, they said a shot + breakthrough infection would give you a super hybrid immunity and THEN you’d definitely never get it again.
The Omicron brought the most cases EVER.
Yeah, this. The whole “and your best protection against Covid is a vaccine” messaging from public health, which continues to this day. And which kind of drives me crazy. Because… no, it isn’t. At least, post Delta, it became clear that the vaccine didn’t prevent infection very well, and with time we learned that it only somewhat reduced your risk of Long Covid. Meaning it was no longer the best protection.
Because your best protection is not catching Covid at all, and masking, ideally supplemented by air cleaning, does a better job of that than vaccines. Masks are your best protection.
So they told you Omicron was “mild,” and said it was actually GOOD everyone was getting hit because we’d reach population level hybrid immunity and that DEFINITELY meant Covid would be over for real this time.
But they had learned they needed more than just a narrative now.
Yeah, and then that whole but Omicron is mild and woo woo, hybrid immunity messaging. That happened in Canada, too. And in case you missed it, it turned out that Omicron was milder than Delta (fortunately!), but not any milder than the preceding strains.
As for hybrid immunity, that didn’t work out for everyone, because the virus is so good at mutating to evade immunity. It was not unknown for people to be reinfected in really short order, like a month or two later.
They launched the NEW Covid map that would hide the actual transmission data in favor of a metric designed to stay green even at levels of transmission higher than the *max* level of the original map. They NEEDED people to believe transmission was low no matter what.
That’s an American thing, the CDC map of Covid risk. What Canada did was pretty much… stop testing (that is, dramatically limiting access to tests). And governments of all stripes stopped regularly reporting on status of Covid. The result was the same asin the US. People didn’t see the scary case charts, they didn’t hear about the disease anymore, they kind of assumed that must mean it’s not really such a problem any longer.
Of course, that was in 2022, the worst, deadliest Covid year of all (so far!) for Canadians.
They quietly launched multiple changes to the rules for how Covid cases, hospitalizations, and even deaths were recorded – changes that meant a lot of cases would no longer show up in the counts. Then they held up comparisons and said…
And Canada borrowed some of this; for example, the “with Covid” vs. “for Covid” hospitalizations, even though that distinction isn’t always that clear cut. And how deaths were counted, well, Canada is always super-slow at doing that, so by the time news is out, it’s pretty old. And what counted as a Covid death could vary by province, with British Columbia, in particular, using a very suspect definition, limiting to those who died within 30 days of diagnosis.
Sometimes Covid takes longer than that to kill people.
… “see how much cases/hospitalizations/deaths went DOWN compared to these other times?” Knowing full well that most people wouldn’t know you are comparing two different data sets then, since they didn’t adjust the old numbers to the new criteria.
But hiding or even eliminating data was only part of it. The other part was MUCH more insidious.
They needed to convince people to accept repeat Covid infections as the new normal, and that it *couldn’t* be stopped anyways so why try?
How do you do that?
It was so jarring (at least for me), that after two years of messaging about the importance of avoiding infection, all of a sudden it was like, on the other hand, let’s just give up on all that completely and surrender to our viral overlords.
Well you can’t afford to have too many people that have never had Covid, or the “it’s unavoidable” lie doesn’t hold up.
So you send still infectious ppl to back to work at day 5. You change the guidance to schools to no longer recommend masking, testing, or quarantine
They wanted us infected. I remember thinking that. That now the government wants me to catch Covid.
I still remember the glee and excitement with which Ontario Chief Medical officer immediately followed the US’ CDC guidance of saying people could go back to work on day 5, supposedly past the peak of infectiousness. Even though we already knew then that was Delta data, and that with Omicron, peak infectiousness was later.
And yeah, and then they did everything to have it run through the schools, infecting almost every child (and then, of course, their parents). Dropping the masks. Dropping the requirement to stay home when sick. No longer allowing schools to tell parents about cases. (It’s just your child’s health. Why should you even be interested in that.)
You end the mask mandates in transportation and healthcare. You push businesses to end telecommuting options and force people back in person.
You move to privatize testing so more ppl unknowingly spread it b/c they can’t justify the costs of testing unless they’re clearly sick
Yep, yep, same, same. First no more protection on the subway and buses, then none on trains and planes (admittedly, due to the Canadian federal government being less eager than the provinces to infect everyone, this protection endured longer than in the US), and finally none even in nursing homes and hospitals. Now, except for individual businesses that might choose otherwise, there’s no mandated protection for anyone, anywhere, except for what one can muster for oneself.
You end a whole bunch of support programs so that people feel economically imperiled – b/c not only does this push holdouts to send their kids back to in-person school and return to in-person jobs, it actively discouraged them from testing because they can’t afford any days off.
And then you specifically reach out to various mouthpieces you’ve cultivated to push carefully crafted narratives that shift away from “you do you” and over to “take pity on those poor folks who just can’t seem to accept the pandemic is over.” You have your own CDC director…
…call masks a “scarlet letter.” You push narratives about how wonderful it is to see smiles again, how burdensome and terrible it was to wear those horrid masks and thank God that’s behind us now.
You create the social pressure to stop masking even if you still wanted to.
Argh, yes. The public health rhetoric under which mask mandates were dropped. Not emphasizing that masking is still a really good idea, even if not required, but instead the smug “Be kind to those who choose to mask”, as though the masked were somehow inconveniencing other people!
When it was the unmasked ones who were being selfish and endangering others.
Which gradually resulted in what you see now, of almost no one masking anymore, and also, almost everyone getting infected, and 10% or of the populationending up with Long Covid, and Covid becoming and staying the leading cause of death amongst infectious disease.
Because the reality is the more people that get Covid and the more times they get it, the easier it is to sell the narrative that Covid is entirely unavoidable now so there is nothing more Biden et al could have done anyways.
But even better than that…
Yeah, that whole “learning to live with Covid” line from public health and politicians actually meant “just accept you’re going to get infected”. It had nothing to do with applying that we had learned to try avoid that happening—while still living your life. Even though that would have been totally possible, and better for everyone.
The more people – and especially their children – get Covid, the more our brains are actually wired to fight against any of the scary facts about the damage Covid does. Your brain will do all sorts of mental gymnastics to try to protect you from the trauma of that information.
And so you start feeling rude even talking about Covid, of even mentioning that taking some precautions might be an idea. Because it’s fine now, right? Because it’s just a cold, basically! Right? It has to be!
So the more you can get people infected, the more their brains will actually leap at ANY narrative you offer than means they don’t have to confront the realities of what those past Covid infections mean.
But it gets EVEN better…
In order to maintain that protective illusion, those same folks will actually start to feel resentment towards anyone who is still avoiding Covid – because they NEED to believe that Covid is no big deal anymore AND that there was nothing they could have done to avoid it anyways.
People who are wearing n95s and aren’t getting Covid all the time threaten that illusion. So public sentiment will naturally shift towards demonizing these folks in order to preserve the illusion and keep that trauma from getting in. They’ll end up doing your dirty work for you.
Oh, it so lets politicians and their minions in public health off the hook! Who needs protections? Who needs clean air? What does it matter if even my doctor doesn’t mask anymore? We’ve all had Covid, so that all must be fine, right? Right? It has to be!
This is why you see stuff like my nurse in the hospital who repeatedly tried to convince me not only that I should ditch my masks, but that it actually wasn’t *healthy* to be concerned about Covid anymore – all while I was laying there with a pulmonary infection and a bad heart.
So in the end, the Biden admin didn’t LOOK like they were pulling the same “scamdemic” playbook as Trump, but in reality they had the SAME goals but were just FAR smarter about how to implement them. Remember “no more tests, no more cases?” Look around.
They told you Covid was over, and systematically pushed folks to take more risks & drop all precautions, all while showing you Biden’s unmasked face doing all the things to sell just how safe it is now.
All while hiding the LAYERS of precautions they use to make that possible.
They regularly test everyone that gets anywhere near him, regardless of if they have symptoms or not.
They have top of the line air filtration and ventilation on top of that. At times they’ve even set up specialized air cleaning systems at other places he’s going to be.
As I say, I don’t know that Canadian politicians have quite as much protection as the US President. I do know that they’ve really improved the ventilation at Queen’s Park in Ontario, though! And they are redoing the Canadian Parliament buildings; I expect the air will be cleaner there afterward, as well.
And that’s great, really. It’s not only politicians who work there. But it’s just that nothing is happening to do the same for everyone else. We need this in schools and nursing homes and hospitals, pronto.
And then everywhere else.
And not only for Covid. Also because of climate change. If outdoor air is going to be polluted on the regular, and it is, then the indoor air needs to be way better than it is.
And you can bet your ass that if they are testing folks to be around the President, there is NO way they’d let a staffer who is still testing positive but is at day 5 return to working with him in person. B/C despite what they told YOU to do, they know it’s not actually safe.
In the end they gave you the SAME Covid playbook as Trump:
- There is no pandemic
- Frame masks in a way ppl either reject them or feel socially ostracized out of using them
- Deflect blame w/narrative any bad that DOES happen is unavoidable/nothing more could been done
If y’all actually understood the reality of what Biden’s admin has done, you’d be rioting in the damn streets.
And he CERTAINLY wouldn’t be the candidate for ‘24. He’d be too untenable for them to even THINK about running (let alone without a primary.)
Except, like, near every politician did this? So who you going to vote for?
It literally keeps me up at night.
And people just clearly have NO clue, walking around like everything’s fine.
Dystopian as hell. Phew.
But yeah. It’s still freakin’ amazing how our government decided that our lives and health just isn’t that important, isn’t worth spending any more time and money protecting, and everyone seems so fine with that. Yep, we’re going to catch Covid every year, and eventually it’s going to disable us and everyone we love, and that’s just peachy keen. Because… Yay! No masks!
Freakin’ amazing.
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