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Munchausen by Fauci
(By “Fauci” I mean the whole edifice of “public health”)
One manifestation of this condition is obvious but relatively harmless: Someone who is double-masked driving alone in a car (and there are many very intelligent folks out there doing so) is displaying a level of anxiety that can’t be healthy but probably of minor impact.
I’m more concerned about the less obvious detriment to our health caused by the overzealous focus on this one virus, and here I am relying on my medical expertise, of which I have zero. My chief concern namely is the damage being done to our immune systems. Our bodies need to be in contact with dangerous pathogens, ideally in manageable doses.
My guess is that the reason we have not seen the expected numbers of COVID deaths in places like India or among supermarket workers is that by allowing manageable doses of the virus to float around, bodies have been given the opportunity to respond normally. It is only when a body is exposed for the first time to an overwhelming dose that the immune system is swamped. [To the medical professionals reading this – is that an immunologically redonkulous opinion?]
By overzealously “protecting” ourselves from COVID have we actually made ourselves more susceptible to a severe case of it? But perhaps more worrisome, what fresh hell are we inviting by the mass weakening our immune systems?
Published in General
I’ve had the exact same concerns, but haven’t seen a professional opinion on the matter.
Very thoughtful question. I’d like to know the answer, too
How about all the children whose job it is to share their runny noses and other mild ailments as they build their immune systems? How many people already have antibodies against this thing, and what happens to them when they are
forcedrequiredencouraged to get a gene therapy vaccine in order to travel? I’m sure there are a million other questions. A Faucian bargain. Paging Dorothy Parker.Others have expressed concern in connection with closed schools and canceled children’s activities that children are not building their natural immunity systems, and that we should expect to see in the next couple of years a lot more severe cases of normal childhood diseases. [Separate from the fact that Covid-related restrictions have kept huge numbers of children from getting their normal childhood vaccinations. ]
Experience with this virus has shown that fatalities are almost uniformly among those with diminished or impaired immune systems. It seems logical to conclude similar outcomes could result from underdeveloped immune systems.
The rate of infection, the dates of occurrence appear to be largely dictated by conditions like temperature and humidity and the levels of pre-existing resistance in a population. Regions strongly tend to have the same curve (The southern tier of the US, the Northeast US, the Midwest). COVID has a statistical fingerprint that has not been disturbed or changed in any way by the various mandated interventions anywhere. COVID’s gonna COVID.
I suspect Korea and Japan have had vastly lower incidence is that historically they have been first in line for whatever viral goodies emerge from China and thus have more acquired resistance. Lockdowns and closures have had a small to non-existent effect and mask mandates have not caused even a blip.
Then there is this:
https://babylonbee.com/news/with-vaccine-ending-pandemic-people-who-yell-at-other-people-to-put-on-their-masks-worried-theyll-never-feel-important-again
Talk about overzealous. I have a friend who fell on the ice and has a serious break in his arm. He has other injuries to his ribs and at this point is very unsteady on his feet. His wife also is unsteady on her feet. I took them to a doctor’s appointment and as we were leaving I pushed him, in a wheelchair, into an elevator which already had two other people in it. This was a fairly good sized elevator, but there was a sign that said only four people were allowed in at a time. As the door was about to close, I turned to my friend’s wife, who was behind me and told her to come on in. As she stepped in, a woman who was already in the elevator started yelling that there was a pandemic on and that one of us must get out. Everyone was masked. The elevator was not crowded. I suppose I could have backed him out but we had already passed on two slow running elevators. As it happened my friend’s wife got out. I could not have trusted her to push the wheelchair out at the next floor down if I got out(we were going from 2 to 1). My friend in the wheelchair was livid and unkind words were exchanged by both parties. A one-floor ride with five masked people. Honestly! With this mentality abroad, it looks like progress will be slow.
I’m sorry to hear about your friend. I suspect that I would have also had angry words for the woman in the elevator but I also am starting to worry what that sustained level of anxiety is doing to people. Stress like that has got to be manifesting itself in different ways both physically and mentally. And my frustration since the beginning of this thing has been the lack of discussion (present company excluded) of the costs of the lockdowns which are going to be widespread and varied but significant.
I think we are looking for concrete answers that do not yet exist. Viruses are everywhere and come in many varieties. Hospitals have been battling them since they first opened their doors because one of the many pneumonia viruses in circulation at any given moment in any given place would claim many surgery patients who would have survived otherwise. Companies like Lysol have been studying how to kill them on surfaces for decades.
A friend of mine has a wart on a knuckle on her hand. She’s had it about twenty years. A dermatologist tried to burn it out twice, and it came back. A hand surgeon said he didn’t dare cut it out because there were too many nerves in the area. Over-the-counter treatments seem to make it disappear, until it reappears. The wart virus just seems to live in the skin at that spot in her hand. Whenever the temperature and humidity are favorable for the virus, it starts to multiply. It retreats when the weather dries out. There’s a lot we do not know about viruses.
The reason the doctors and hospital administrators lost their cool in confronting covid-19 was that it was the monster of their worst fears. They had hundreds of infectious-disease controls in place in their facilities, but this new virus blew through all of those safety doors.
They have tried a lot of hit-or-miss, maybe-this-will-work strategies to combat it. Some have been kind of funny to watch. They could not figure out a reliable quarantine period at first. Finally they lit on two weeks, which is generally efficacious for most bacterial and viral infections. It seemed to work. People seemed to be testing negative after two weeks in quarantine after symptoms first appeared, and eventually, the doctors reduced that number of days to nine or ten. But it was just dumb luck. They had no idea how long the incubation period was, if this virus would hide in body parts and systems away from the nasal swab tests, if it could live in the GI tract or not (it can and does).
The course of this pandemic as it has spread around the world has been an amazing spectacle to witness. The only countries where it has not been found are ten small islands in the South Pacific. That is remarkable. It happened so fast.
The good news is that the immune system God gave us human beings is even more amazing than this virus. Our immune system appears to have won this battle of good versus evil, and it’s a good thing it didn’t require our perfect understanding of the virus to make that happen. :-)
I hope and pray that we have learned what we have needed to learn over the past eighteen months to prevent future corona virus pandemics.
For some time now I have steeled myself to give the same response to people who are like this: “You have a nice day, too.”
There are so many issues going on. Our healthcare system is currently useless. I know someone who had a 24 hr old negative Covid test with flu symptoms who went to the doctor and the only thing they were willing to do was give her another Covid test. They would not give her a flu test.
I have issues with strep throat. It’s my repetitious illness. I can self diagnose at this point it happens so frequently. How on earth do I get antibiotics if going to the doctor is a Covid test and no looking in ears, looking in throat, checking for swollen glands, etc? For heavens sake, pink eye is a “symptom” of Covid! I don’t trust them. Not even a little bit.
You aren’t wrong about kids immune systems – I stayed home with all my kids. My oldest was never sick until he started kindergarten. While everyone else got their illnesses in preschool, mine hit it at the K year. But now we are back to “never sick”.
I’m done with this. Everything we knew about germs, illness, and health care has been destroyed by this incredibly pathetic version of a Black Plague. I half expect Fauci to send out wagons collecting our infected to burn them alive in order to sell how horribly serious Covid is.
And before the “compassionate” hand wringing begins, yes I know people have died from this illness and it’s not a cake walk. But how about sparing some of your compassion for the living?
I did my grocery shopping this morning. The store is a large supermarket. I suppose there might have been a couple hundred people in the building, all masked. I have both of my Covid vaccinations behind me, the second having been administered last Saturday. The science, at least the believable science I have read out of Israel, says that it is highly unlikely that I could get infected or pass viruses to anyone else. Yet this morning when another man, probably close to my age, who at another time I might have passed pleasantries with, and I passed each other in an aisle in which we were the only occupants I noted a sense of threat which given his body language was likely mutual. This is insane! Fauci and his compatriots, for whatever reason, are causing a breakdown in our society which is only adding to the separation begun by Wokeness and further exacerbated by politics.
I have never been one to buy into conspiracy theories. However, if divide and conquer is a goal of the left, they could not be more successful in their efforts at this point. We are being Balkanized into smaller and smaller tribes, and were it not for sites like this one, it is likely that our existential aloneness in this crisis would reach even those of us with the education and awareness needed to survive.
Covid can make it through masks that aren’t N95 so I suspect people are getting “microdosed” with it already, and that may be helping some immunity (I don’t know). I think, if anything, the mask mandates basically became a license for people to go out and congregate close to each other without really considering whether they were sick or not. The (negative) behavioral tradeoffs were/are probably swamping any benefit a mask can provide. Since the mask mandate I see people wearing masks but then deciding to walk shoulder to shoulder in groups or crowd next to each other in the store. The paradox is that at the same time we are masking up to try and keep some normalcy in our lives, we are teaching people to also be deathly afraid of anyone not wearing a mask. I don’t know if policymakers have really thought about what it means to teach this type of fear.
The lunacy is apparent just watching sports. College football and basketball coaches with the masks down around their necks, yelling at their teams. Our local paper with pictures of the high school basketball team wearing masks while playing (!!) against teams not wearing masks. “Time out” and the non-masked players on the field/floor go back to consult with coaches and sideline players half-wearing their masks. A basket/TD/goal is scored and the players hug each other. After the games, you know the masks are off in the locker rooms.
It’s like a giant “the emperor has no clothes” act.
Yet the people are as blind as the emperor.