The ‘anti-vaxxer’ crowd (including that portion who ‘aren’t against all vaccines, just the covid ones’), with their misinformation, wilful ignorance, and no better solutions for managing a pandemic, are supremely ungrateful ...
Up front, sorry for the length...
There absolutely was a better way to handle it, and it was no secret during the pandemic: inform the public of the risks, and let them naturally do what's best based on their risk profile.
The problem was that from the start of the pandemic the relevant risk information was suppressed and hidden as much as possible. Everyone was asking "what's the death rate?" But there were no clear answers. There was, however, a lot of stoked-up fear. There were articles, polls, and interviews, even recently, that showed (especially among people on the left, undoubtedly because of where they got their news) the perceived chance of death after contracting c19 was 50%. Nevertheless, near the beginning people were attempting to compare the death rate to the flu - not in an attempt to claim it was the flu (even though some said that), but people were looking for a baseline for risk. The flu has a risk to it. People die from it. I know a young boy that died from it. Very tragic. But every year there is a risk. And people wanted to figure out their risk profile and decide accordingly. What they wanted to know is how does the average, healthy human fair against COVID vs the flu. To this day we still don't know the real death rate. But what we DID KNOW at the time is that for kids and young people, the risk was extremely low. It went up when you got over 60, or if you had complicating factors. So, the elderly and sick should be isolated - not the entire economic system. Don't shut down schools. Don't shut down businesses.
Two weeks to stop the spread turned into a complete shut down. And the risk ... the risk that people were experiencing didn't match the extreme shut down measures. We got news about over-capcity hospitals - but there again, the details were hidden. Hospitals defined "full capacity" as having all the patients the current staff could handle. That could be 10% of actual beds. What followed from that? Well, in NY they brought in ships for more room. But they never saw any patients. Or the "overflow" from hosptials was moved to nursing homes - into direct contact with the highest risk demographic. Meanwhile the healthiest thing - getting sunshine - was prohibited. Some states like FL did fight back, with good results.
I think we are just starting to feel the real consequences of the shut down, combined with the money printing. Two years ago the average house price was $215K. Now it's $400K. I have four kids, and you can't convince me food prices haven't at least doubled.
And here is where it started to cross into politics. The high level of fear mongering played right into justification for the lockdowns. And the people pushing it have always had an anti-captalist bent. It became clearer that if these "emergencies" were actually exceptions to constitutional rights, then we really don't have rights. Just claim a crisis, hype it up, and start doing what you want... you know, for the good of everyone. And you didn't have to wait long to find validation of that. It seems C19 was an exception to every aspect of the 1st ammendment.
So, IMHO there wasn't some grand conspiracy to release C19 in order to exert more governmental control. But once it was out there, it was sure used to that end. And for the conspiracy minded, it can be really hard not to infer intent - especially when you don't trust the good intentions of the leftists (which you should never do anyway). Keep in mind, this is the exact time that the WEF collectively got the most massive authoritarian erection they've ever had, while publishing their plans for "The Great Reset".
The vaccines are a completely different story. They started out as project Warp Speed - and that was a Trump sponsored program.
The objection to the mRNA vaccines in general goes something like this: The mechanism for the vaccine, from the people who developed the technology, is to inject messenger RNA into healthy cells. The mRNA encodes what it needs to mass produce some molecule that you wish to inform the immune system about - in this case the spiked protein used as a receptor for C19. Healthy cells then produce the spiked protein, the immune system reacts, targeting this protein for the future. This is all well and good. However, the immune system still has to go after the formerly healthy cells that have been hijacked. These healthy cells, presumably, are the arm muscle tissue where the injection takes place. And, presumably, we dont hijack too many cells (whatever that means). And, presumably, all the vaccine stays in the arm. But what if it doesn't? What if it sticks around longer than expected? What if the vaccine circulates, what happens when it hijacks a healthy heart cell or brain cell?
The answer is that you would expect to see cases of heart inflamation - if heart tissue is involved. If it's circulating, causing damage to blood vessels, you might expect to see blood clots and strokes. And not necessarily immediately after taking the vaccine. And, that seems to be the type of signal we see in adverse vaccine reporting systems - whether foreign or VAERS.
None of the above is conspiratorial. All that's required is to believe the obvious facts: the government through a ton of money at pharma, including emergency use immunity, and pharma was happy to pull out whatever tech they had at the time. The mRNA tech was not new. Why didn't they use it prior to this is an interesting question to consider, however.
It turned political when Trump lost, and the vaccine was handed over to the left. When it was Trump's vaccine, it was to be viewed with disdain. But after the election, it was the best thing ever. And if it had stopped there (with the shift in positions), we could just chalk it up to normal two-faced politics. But nope - the lockdowns continued. And, in fact, those who were vaccine skeptical (even under Trump) were now the REASON why the lockdowns couldn't stop. Businesses were pressured to "encourage" vaccination, sometimes with employment on the line (look at the Tyson foods lawsuits). Vaccine passports and other insane leftist programs were pushed.
Suddenly, for the conspiracy minded, it's easy to see intent where there was none.
Same thing with the election. There wasn't some worldwide "they" behind the release of the virus. But once it was out there, it was used to push mail in voting, despite it violating state constitutions. Everyone could see the ballot train wreck coming. SCOTUS should have taken that case. That's a whole different topic, though.
But to the conspiracy minded, the pattern matches.
In the end, what's obvious to me : the left is nuts, the government is too big, we shouldn't be funding gain-of-function research. The government needs to be put back in its box. No more power to lock down, not for a virus, not for climate change. No WHO control, no vaccine passports. Emergencies can't bypass rights. I think if that were codified somehow, you would have a lot less shenanigans from the left.
Unfortunately , that would reinforce conspiracy theories.
