Hammers and Nails: Stop Treating COVID As If it is Equally Dangerous to Everybody

In the October issue of Imprimis, Jay Bhattachary, a is a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, explores a Compassionate ANTI-COVID strategy. It’s a great read, and he makes a point that stood out as one we make almost daily.

The single most important fact about the COVID pandemic—in terms of deciding how to respond to it on both an individual and a governmental basis—is that it is not equally dangerous for everybody. This became clear very early on, but for some reason our public health messaging failed to get this fact out to the public.

The easiest way to describe the public health and political response to COVID19, even here in New Hampshire, is that the state is a hammer and everything looks like a nail. Early on, when we knew nothing, that was not necessarily the wrong way to start.

A few weeks in, when we already knew better, the politicians never put away the hammer. In many instances, it liked the feeling so much that it went out and got a bigger one.

This despite significant differences in risk and a minimal threat to anyone from birth to 60 years of age.

The government and public policy are still doing it wrong and punishing everyone for that fault. While literally screwing up the only part of it that truly matters. Long Term Care Facilities (LTCF) continue to be ground zero for COVID19 deaths after nine months of hammering.

These are not the results of experts at anything but failure.

But raising concerns about these policy abuses inside and outside of LTCF’s gets you more hammer. You’re killing grandma? No, the state is killing grandma, healthy teenagers, young adults, job creators, and their employees; destroyed by political forces, not to mention a million other failures.

This is why I call it Covidism. A form of clinical or public health fascism. It is indifferent to anything but its own policy and the power needed to enforce it. INdifferent to its own data or the harm done by its policies.

A policy that claims to put public health first at the expense of the health of people who have little or nothing to fear from COVID19.

Professor Jay Bhattachary continues (edited and reformatted),

In the last 20 years we’ve lifted one billion people worldwide out of poverty. This year – an estimated 130 million more people will starve.
[Because of Lockdowns] Eighty million children worldwide are now at risk of ..diseases [w]e had made substantial progress in slowing… but now they are going to come back.
We’re going to see a rise in cancer and cancer death rates.
Mental health problems are in a way the most shocking thing. In June of this year, a CDC survey found that one in four young adults between 18 and 24 had seriously considered suicide.

None of this matters to the hammer. At least, I see no evidence that it does. And until we change that, there can be no expectation the hammer will stop or give back the power it has grown to love.

Previous Reports (published date – Case Summary date will be the day before the republished date)

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