It’s Over

I’m declaring that the COVID-19 pandemic is over. While I have no authority to make such a declaration for the world, I can use common sense and make decisions for myself. And in this case they do seem to align with reality.

Biden declared the pandemic over, and he has titular authority. But those surrounding him walked that back, saying no, not really over over, still worth worrying about and therefore worth submitting to orders from the elites.

For some time I've thought I would write one last post on the subject. And my plan was to use the data I collect daily, chart it, and compare the various years or segments of years, and thereafter give myself permission to stop the habit of daily trips to the data sites. However, a month or two ago, the sources that had been giving daily data changed to weekly, or what seems random but is something like every 3-5 days. Others are daily, but since they aggregate from less frequent sources, they make daily charting less accurate. So I may or may not ever get to that comparison chart. But I can show a few things. Here are a couple of charts (not made by me):

charts from here on December 14, 2022

These are low resolution, but you can see the progression of the pandemic. We had a sizable bump in cases in January 2021 (coinciding, coincidentally, with the rollout of vaccines), and then another bump late summer, followed by a huge bump in January 2022. January 2021 was the Delta variant mainly. January 2022 was Omicron—a much milder strain, albeit perhaps even more contagious. After that January spike, there was a steep drop-off in cases, which continues to trickle on to pretty much background noise.

Parallel are the deaths due to COVID-19. We had the initial stage around April 2020, a bump in late summer, a large spike in January 2021, then a couple of lesser rises in fall 2021 to January 2022. January 2022 was a much lower spike than the previous year, despite a much higher spike in cases—again, showing the Omicron variant was less deadly. After January 2022 deaths dropped precipitously, and they remain low. This is likely due to the ubiquitous Omicron variant and its subvariants, which are more like a bad cold than the scary thing we were told we were facing in early-to-mid 2020.

Whether you’re measuring cases or deaths, there’s not much news there anymore. With the fear of sudden death—or suddenly killing granny—some people are able to approach the subject more rationally, at last. But not very rationally.

Pandemic Amnesty

A few weeks ago there was a piece that got some attention, “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty,” by Emily Oster for The Atlantic, October 31, 2022.  It attempts to be a thoughtful piece, talking through some of the things we did in the beginning out of fear, or lack of knowledge; we just didn’t know better. I’ve been thinking deeply about the casual dismissal for weeks now. And this week Joshua Philipp on Crossroads interviewed Dr. Aaron Kheriaty about calls for amnesty related to the pandemic (in two parts, here and here). Dr. Kheriaty considers the suggestion in the Atlantic piece with a lot more depth, and with a lot more background about medical ethics, which is his specialty.

So, instead of writing “one last piece,” with lots of charts (maybe I’ll still do that someday), I really want to look at how/whether we can go forward with forgiveness.

Oster seems to think that being right or wrong about things related to the pandemic was mainly just a matter of luck. But she lists things that we either did know, could have known if we were paying attention (I did), or things we shouldn’t have done regardless of what we knew.

She talks about how she and her family, back around April 2020, hiked with homemade cloth masks on, alerting each other to oncoming people on the trail, so they could avoid them—when we soon knew that the disease wasn’t spreading by casual passing outdoors. And that those cloth masks didn’t work anyway. (Nor did any other masks work on viruses, which were much smaller than the particles filtered out.) How silly that seems now that we know better.

OK. I wore a mask—but never out of fear; only out of compliance to law or to request from church or stores, etc., where they were required to alleviate other people’s fears or to comply with imposed regulations in order to not get shut down. In the past more than a year, the only place I have worn a mask is in a doctor’s office that still requires masks (of any sort, regardless of efficacy), even though they should know better.

Oster tries to make it look like—well, there were misunderstandings on both sides. She says,

Remember when the public-health community had to spend a lot of time and resources urging Americans not to inject themselves with bleach? That was bad. Misinformation was, and remains, a huge problem. But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society.

I remember when people intending to mislead tried to claim there were people recommending injecting bleach—a falsehood and wild misrepresentation of some of the work that was being done in reality. I remember that huge amounts of actual truth were being labeled as misinformation. I wrote this about the accusation in April 2020 when it happened: 

There was nothing in what President Trump said that wasn’t related to UV rays as a disinfectant. Take a look at the transcript. [I transcribed the President in the footnote.] If you heard “disinfectant” and thought only of Lysol and Clorox, and “inject” and thought only of a needle—not that light the dentist “injects” into your mouth to cure the material used in your filling, or not the scope the gastroenterologist “injects” to view your intestines during a colonoscopy—that is your failure to see things in more than one limited way.

Was misinformation a huge problem, and is it still? It was, but only because the elites were purposefully misinforming us, and then censoring us when we countered with the truth. And yes, that is still a problem, but the more truth that gets out, the more people are realizing what got censored was the truth all along.

I remember the silencing of doctors who were having success with various treatments. I remember these things because they haven’t ended yet. Some of the most respected and successful doctors, giving real data, using real science, are even now being silenced and discredited—and their credentials being stripped from them—not because they’re saying wildly incorrect and dangerous things, but because they do not align with the worldwide cabal’s stated narrative. I’m talking about doctors like Peter McCullough, Robert Malone, Pierre Kory, and a number of others.

And if Oster is characterizing things like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as akin to “injecting themselves with bleach,” or possibly “eating horse paste,” then that is simply another lie. If we’re supposed to agree that both sides were wrong on some things, that won’t fly; all the censoring was of truth that we knew and were not allowed to say.

And therefore we are not ready for amnesty.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness is an interesting and complex abstract idea. There is a somewhat messy mix of “I want to get along,” “I want to see justice done,” “I want to be a good person, but I’m still feeling injured,” and more. Oster’s piece sort of says, let’s just put all that behind us and move on; after all, we were all equally wrong about some things. Except—we weren’t equally wrong. Beyond the very early time when I sanitized my groceries before putting them away in my house—a practice I imposed on no one else—I was seeking truth and finding more and more of it, mostly at odds with the Fauci lies.

Related to this pandemic there are a few people I can agree to amnesty with, people who were sincere, frightened, and misinformed, but also never militant against those who didn’t see things the same way they did. They might have worried about non-mask-wearers or non-vaccine-getters, but they wouldn’t have ostracized us or condemned us.

But there were others, like those who shouted at friends of mine who were walking together, husband, wife, and son, because they weren’t socially distancing—outside, only among people who lived together in the same house. The shouters don’t deserve amnesty; they need to change their ways and prove they can be trusted in society again.

Then there’s the next level up, the silencers, the ones who set and enforced rules against disagreement. Censorship is not an accident of temporary misunderstanding; it is a constitutional-level crime. Have amends been made? Have they even stopped doing it yet?

Nuremberg image, screenshot from here

There are those who imposed vaccine mandates—of an untested experimental drug—on people, against the very principles of the Nuremberg Code, principles we imposed on ourselves to keep atrocities such as happened during WWII from ever happening again. The ones who broke their contracts with hospital employees, college students, and travelers as a coercion to take such medical interventions—have they made up the losses in pay and opportunities to those who wouldn’t give in to their coercion? A few are finally considering it. But how do you explain refusing a kidney transplant to a child because she is unvaccinated—when she wasn’t at serious risk from the illness but did have elevated risk from the vaccines? Such decisions are evil. This is ongoing, so clearly there’s no making amends there yet. Have such power wielders apologized and compensated those who took the experimental vaccines under duress and who may have suffered injury or death as a result?

There are those who set the policies in motion. There are those who encouraged the creation of the virus, and then covered up its origins, lied about them. There are those who took the safe and effective (and cheap) drugs off the market, or took away doctors’ abilities to prescribe them—with the full knowledge that they would work, and that depriving people of them would cause suffering and death. (I wrote about this here.) 

We could speculate that such people—Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, the CCP, the WEF, the WHO, the CDC—that they knew the catastrophic death and injury they would cause and were fine with that, for whatever ulterior motive: greed, Malthusian death plots, power mongering. Is it even possible in this life for such people to make amends? For millions of deaths? For many more millions of injuries from the illness and/or from the so-called vaccines? For trillions of dollars in economic loss? For the loss of freedom and opportunity to heretofore free societies?

You can’t wave off such things with a blanket call for pandemic amnesty. We need compensation. We need to be made whole. And we need absolute rock-hard guarantees that such things will never happen again. We can only approach getting such guarantees if we hold accountable the wrongdoers in this pandemic.

Forgiveness is a complex thing. According to Dr. Stephen Marmer you might look at it in three levels. The first is exoneration: this is acting as if the wrong never happened. You exonerate wrongdoers who are incapable of knowing they were in the wrong, such as young children, or people who express their sincere sorrow, regret the hurt they caused, do all they can to make amends, and go forward with every effort not to cause that hurt again. For such people, you continue the relationship as though the wrong never happened.

According to Dr. Stephen Marmer, there are 3 types of forgiveness:
exoneration, forbearance, and release. Screenshot from here.

What about people who don’t sincerely apologize, or maybe don’t even recognize the hurt they’ve caused? Depending on the severity of the hurt and the value you place on the relationship, you might use what Dr. Marmer refers to as forbearance. This is for that in-law at Thanksgiving dinner who always says something offensive. Do you put up with it, because having the other relatives together is important enough? It’s up to you.

But what about for severe wrongdoing, abuse, harm? Under these circumstances, it might not be possible for a person to make amends. Deaths may have happened. Financial losses beyond what can be paid back might have happened. Irreparable harm may have been done. What then?

We’re supposed to forgive all—according to scriptures: Matthew 18:21-22; Luke 6:37; Ephesians 4:32; Doctrine & Covenants 64:10.

What does forgiveness really mean? Do we let murderers walk the streets to kill again, just so we can virtue signal that we are the forgiving type? No, we must not do that.

What we can do is get out of the revenge business. We can leave getting justice to the law. We can, as Dr. Marmer says, release. This may include never interacting with the person again, in some cases. It may look very different from exoneration. It still removes the poison of vengeance from you personally.

You might see this level of forgiveness in a messy divorce, in which the spouse and/or children were abused. You separate as cleanly and completely as possible. Never tolerate any more abuse. End contact if possible. The forgiveness shows in the lessening need to talk about the wrongdoings of the offender, because you have released the vengeance, so you can go forward with your life, free of both the abuser and the poison of ongoing bitterness and anger about it.

In the case of a murderer, we let the law (assuming the law is just, and not corrupt) take care of getting the perpetrator to “pay his debt to society.” You can’t bring back a dead person, but you can take the perpetrator’s freedom away (or in some capital murder cases, his life), putting him in a place where he can do no more harm to society and is paying a cost for the crime.

In the case of the mass murderers involved in this pandemic, we may or may not ever see justice come in this life. Still, we can release the vengeance for God to take care of. It does not delight me to picture the outcomes that are likely to come to such perpetrators. But I know God is both just and merciful—knowing mercy cannot rob justice. So any mercy granted must entail the character changes and making amends—the repentance—that God requires.

As for us, in whatever ways are in our powers, we must hold such people accountable, and we must never trust them in a position of power over us. No exoneration. No forbearance. Release, yes, including excising them from our lives.

But forgive and forget? For the sake of respect for all those lives lost that cry from the dust, and for the sake of those who have suffered and continue to suffer because of the massive sins involved in this pandemic—we must not forget. As we said after WWII, we must never forget. And this time we had better mean it.