"The arrival of a new infectious virus was not unprecedented, but the response to it was."

From Public Health's Sacrificial Lambs by The Ivy Exile.  

At the time Covid-19 burst on the American scene in February 2020, there was already in place a series of pandemic protocols, both at the CDC and at the World Health Organization.  They were broadly similar to one another, varying by degree and emphasis rather than in kind.  

They were similar because they were both based on decades of accumulated knowledge, experience and empirical evidence.

The legacy media never seemed to fully comprehend just how deviant was the government response to Covid-19 and certainly never held the response up to the standard set by the plan.  They cheered on the totalitarian decisions and decried the commonsense responses which were reflected in the pre-existing protocols.

The Ivy Exile is perhaps among the more explicit in articulating now what was condemned back then.

In trying to wrap my mind around the self-inflicted catastrophe that was America’s COVID-19 lockdown regime, imposed five years ago this spring, I’ve been inclined to assume that public health leaders deserved something close to a free pass for those surreal first few months — that given the panic and the fog of war, people such as Anthony Fauci were entitled to some measure of grace as they adapted to a fluid situation. But in his harrowing and revelatory new book, An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, journalist David Zweig details how swiftly national COVID-19 policies diverged from the broadly accepted protocols enshrined in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s pandemic playbook toward an indefinite lockdown model seemingly inspired by China’s heavy-handed mitigation efforts. “The arrival of a new infectious virus was not unprecedented,” he writes. “But the response to it was.”

At the five-year anniversary, a number of books and retrospectives are coming out, finally telling the story which was known but actively suppressed in 2020.   

With Zweig’s young children languishing in front of screens at home week after week and fading prospects of getting them back into classrooms, in spring 2020, the professional researcher and fact-checker started digging into school closure policies around the world, scouring studies and speaking with epidemiologists and other public health specialists, particularly in Europe. What he learned was as baffling as it was frustrating: Many of the so-called studies the New York Times and much of the American media breathlessly cited were based upon computer modeling built on assumptions that were iffy at best, and evidence seemed to suggest that not only were children typically less vulnerable to COVID-19 than to some years’ more virulent strains of influenza, and far less likely to transmit the virus than adults, but that the entire dubious strategy of locking down schools for months was unlikely to do much to slow the spread. Whatever fleeting benefits were likely to be more than outweighed by the longer-term disruption to children’s educations and development, prompting schools throughout Europe to begin reopening by early May of that year, if they’d considered it prudent to close in the first place.

And yet, as Zweig attempted to air his findings among mainstream American media with whom he’d published before, including the New York Times, he almost always found a striking absence of curiosity or critical analysis. That uncanny disinterest “dovetailed with an ignorance and dismissal of a rich literature on both the inescapable harms that would result from the closures and on the evidence of their lack of benefit in the long term,” he writes. “Reasonable people could disagree about whether the schools in the US should open or not at that time, but there was close to zero dissent among politicians or in the framing by legacy media outlets on the topic. The narrative was set.”

The substack is worth a read for the galling evidence of the absence of wisdom, leadership, courage, or knowledge exhibited by the Mandarin Class and their near comprehensive failure.

There is a strong parallel in all this to the revelations coming out now about how clear was Biden's cognitive collapse after 2020 to his inner circle.  And his outer circle.  And to anyone else who was paying attention.

Its taken five years for the Covid-19 "Now the truth can be told" time to come around.  It has only taken five months for the "Now the truth can be told" time to arrive for Biden's cognitive collapse.

In both cases, the legacy media was both a propaganda tool for creating and maintaining the lie at the time and serving as a mechanism for the truth to be told now that it is more convenient.

It is easy to look at these fact patterns and conclude that the legacy mainstream media is no longer independent and functions solely as a propaganda organ of the establishment (Establishment Democrats and Establishment Republicans).  

I suspect the truth is that the business model of legacy media has collapsed (all the ad revenue disappeared online to Google and Facebook) and that in their financial emaciation and desperation, all the propaganda is actually simply an emergent order arising from unintended financial incentives and reduced capabilities (hard to do hard hitting reporting if you have fired all your reporters).  Even if it looks like corrupt propaganda.