How America Botched Covid and Ruined Christmas — Yet Again
We All Knew Another Wave Was on the Way. Only America’s Hopelessly Ignorant Elites Didn’t See it Coming.
umair haque
Dec 25 

So. How’s your Christmas going? Ours? Ruined. We all got Covid, right before the holidays. My wife couldn’t see her side of the family, and I couldn’t see mine. Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful that we’re together, me, her, the doggie, my mom. But it would have been nice to have a proper Christmas with everyone. It was hardly just us, though. More or less everyone we know was in some similar kind of boat — or maybe life-raft. Some much shakier than others. There are people stuck at airports or watching their loved ones in the hospital, at least judging from how sirens are now going by every hour or so.

I’d bet that right about now, a lot of Americans are a little angry, even if they’re trying to politely hide it with forced holiday cheer, about having their Christmases ruined. They should be. Because America bungled Covid, all over again.

How so? Let me begin at the beginning.

Just about three weeks ago or so, I was shocked — though maybe I shouldn’t have been — to read article after article which said the same thing. They all came from America’s elites, usually pundits — not, crucially, scientists. And they all said the same thing. The pandemic’s over.

This was literally days before Omicron hit. And that, my friends, set the stage for America bungling Covid yet again. I’ll get to that part. First, I want to drive this point home. So I’m going to be thorough in giving you some examples.

“The pandemic is ending with a whimper,” a pundit wrote, on November 27th. You may know her. She appears on CNN all the time. She’s a Homeland Security type of some sort. Who knows? But remind me what business a pundit has proclaiming a pandemic over?

But she was far from the only one.

The week before that, another wrote in the New York Times that “The bottom line is that Covid now presents the sort of risk to most vaccinated people that we unthinkingly accept in other parts of life. And there is not going to be a day when we wake up to headlines proclaiming that Covid is defeated. In many ways, the future of the virus has arrived.” Translation, everything’s fine now! Wait, has he read any actual science? I’ll come back to that part, too.

“The pandemic appears to be winding down in the United States in a thousand subtle ways, but without any singular milestone, or a cymbal-crashing announcement of freedom from the virus.” The Washington Post, October 31st.

Here’s what the former FDA Commissioner said on “Face the Nation” in late November: “I think that we’re close to the end of the pandemic phase of this virus… As things improve, cases may pick up, but that doesn’t mean we’re entering into another wave of infection.”

Here’s a truly incredible example: a new York Times columnist asking on November 16th when the US can “Declare Victory” over Covid. That article quotes yet another columnist in the Atlantic, saying that Covid case numbers are not a “useful metric for guiding our pandemic thinking,” which made my doctor wife shout out in pain when she read this shockingly insane quote.

You know how Bill Gates is saying that Covid will be over in 2022? Guess what? He also said it would be over by 2021.

Meanwhile, here’s what an actual public health expert had to say. “Everyone wants there to be an end day, a day when we declare the pandemic is over. No one asks about when is the end of the flu, for example. This is a disease that will be us, for the foreseeable future, it’s going to come and go,” said Dr. David Dowdy, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

You knew there was going to be another wave. I knew there was going to be another wave. We all did. How did we know that? You don’t have to be like me and my lovely doctor-scientist wife — nerds who read science papers, mesmerised by facts like “Coronaviruses are highly recombinogenic” and “Coronaviruses have already acquired functional genes from other entire kinds of viruses” and “recombination patterns are conserved across Spike proteins from MERS to Covid-19.”

You don’t need to know all that, but it helps. You only need to be barely scientifically literate. You only need to know that Coronaviruses recombine way more than other viruses, that the spike protein is a primary site of such recombination, that replication gives rise to mutation and so forth. You just have to have read a few basic articles about science 101 in the last year to have understood that a new wave was going to arrive, bang on cue, just as the winter did.

Everybody knew it. Everybody vaguely aware of anything, that is. Every doctor I know knew it. Every scientist did. But so did every teacher, engineer, plumber, and professor. You didn’t have to be a virologist to understand that the pandemic wasn’t over, and another wave was on the way.

But America’s elites didn’t get that. Because they are scientifically illiterate. Pundits like the ones I’ve quoted above appear — even at this late stage — totally and completely ignorant of the most basic scientific facts about Coronaviruses in particular or pandemics in general. How can you not even have read a basic paper — just one — even an abstract, even an article, even a sentence, that teaches you that Coronaviruses don’t magically just go away, at this point?

God help us all, these people are idiots. I don’t say that lightly. Hey, don’t be mean, Umair, you might say. Everybody can be wrong. Sure they can. But that’s not the issue. They’re not just wrong, they’re aggressively wrong, wrong with a bazooka on their shoulder. And they never learn or acknowledge that they’re wrong. Try to engage them with science, logic, facts, and reason, and they’ll come after you with schoolyard insults and turn you into the problem, the controversy, the issue. They’re wrong over and over again to the point that they’re the world’s laughingstocks, and still don’t learn a damned thing from the humiliation of it.

They are not people who appear to think or know or want to think or know anything at all. They are to human knowledge and the governance of societies what Dog the Bounty Hunter is to jurisprudence. My plumber knew that a new wave was coming. Meanwhile…these fools. If I’m ever so wrong that I ruin an entire country’s Christmas, by all means, call me an idiot, too.

But, and here’s the problem, they have all the power.

You see, America isn’t run like other countries, particularly healthy democracies. It’s not just the Trumpist angle that’s the issue. It’s that America’s really run by something called “the narrative.” “The narrative” emerges around every issue. It’s a kind of groupthink consensus amongst American elites.

Who, unfortunately for the rest of us, are some of the most ignorant yet most hubristically arrogant people on planet Earth. They’re not just ignorant and incorrect, they’re also totally confident that their ignorance is infallible wisdom. They are ignoramuses in the deepest sense the word has ever had one. Imagine telling a nation, proudly, that a pandemic’s over…when every sane doctor and scientist knows it’s not…days before a new variant arrives to ruin Christmas. Imagine having the gall to be that insultingly arrogant and have that much contempt for actual science, reason, facts, logic…to be that indifferent to human knowledge and social governance itself. The word disgrace doesn’t do it justice. Soviet level ignorance, basking smugly in their incompetence maybe, does.

But they have all the power, because they control the narrative.

It seems as if nobody in the American elite was allowed to say, hey wait, guys — the pandemic’s not over. That is vivid evidence that the narrative had emerged on this topic, Covid, and no deviation, no thought, no fact or logic was allowed. The narrative, once it emerges, can’t be challenged. It can only be policed and disseminated. Everybody has to toe the line or else they’re risking not being part of the American elite anymore. Manufacturing consent. False consciousness. I prefer: fairy tales.

“The narrative” is what really runs America. It’s a weirdly Soviet thing — decision-making by a council of elders, accountable to nobody, elected by no one, talking heads who get it wrong, over and over again, and yet never learn a damned thing. The narrative precludes and shapes political possibilities. Nobody can go against it. The second I write anything opposed to “the narrative”? I’m instantly — within minutes — abused and insulted by New York Times columnists and conservative pundits both and so forth of all kinds, with not a tiny bit of regard for anything substantive, like science, reason, facts, logic. Bang — American elites are always, always thoughtpolicing the narrative for dissent, just like in the Soviet Union. So imagine how bad it is for, say, a President. We’ll come to that.

In case you think I exaggerate, let’s go through a few examples of “the narrative.” Remember 2016? The narrative was that Hillary’s emails were the danger, and that Trump couldn’t possibly be a fascist — those of us who warned he was were mocked, insulted, attacked, pilloried, by the very people who were begging and pleading for a democracy on Jan 6th. Meanwhile, as it turns out, Hillary’s email were hacked by Russian military intelligence. The narrative is what propelled Trump to power — and it turned out to be incredibly, stupidly, flagrantly wrong. (By the way, was there ever any accountability for this? Did the pundits come together and apologise for helping to mislead the nation? Of course not.)

Then there’s the narrative that the American economy’s “booming.” This one’s evergreen. The American economy’s always booming, if you ask a pundit or an elite. They can never admit it’s not — even when the statistics say that the majority of Americans can’t raise a few hundred dollars for an emergency, a full half of America works “low wage service jobs,” and the average American dies in debt. Reality? It’s never mattered to America’s elites one bit.

So. The narrative was emerging, as it always does, on every issue. The narrative on Covid was that it was ending. Over. Done with. Ending with a “whimper,” according to one, who has nightly spots on CNN, reaching millions of people. Already ended, according to another, who said we just had to say so to make it official — a man who has a New York Times column that wields incalculable power.

Who was going to go against the narrative? Not, as it turned out, anyone. Anyone in power, that is. Even America’s senior most public health figures failed to warn that another wave was probably on the way. They let the narrative slide and grow — because, again, if you challenge it, the elites behind the narrative will unite to make sure that your career is over, that you’re called an idiot, a rube, a fool, and so forth. Even when they’re the ones who are illiterate in every serious sense of the word, the narrative having been wrong about everything from Trumpism to society to the economy — and this time, wrong about Covid.

Here’s a number of articles misinterpreting Fauci as saying the pandemic was nearly over. And that’s exactly what I mean by “the narrative.”

What I mean by the “narrative” is that something truly incredible is presented as a matter of “debate.” That a pandemic will magically end just because…that’s what pundits want. Meanwhile, anything that science or facts or logic actually have to say on the matter is dismissed as merely a “side” of the debate. But maybe even that’s too generous, because it was just at the end of September that a team advising the CDC announced that “the pandemic may finally be over.” This too is part of “the narrative” — academics building obviously implausible models that are proven false within 2 months to support the fairy tale, instead of thinking logically and rigorously about the issue.

And if you want to know what I mean by rigorous and logic thinking, here is what Dame Professor Sarah Gilbert, who created the Oxford vaccine, has to say: “this pandemic is not done with us. Let me put that in perspective: pundits were caught in a self-reinforcing cycle of groupthink, peddling the fairy tale that the pandemic was over, while nobody was listening to the woman who literally invented a Covid vaccine, warning that it wasn’t.

Hence, lulled into a false sense of complacency by this idiot’s fairy tale that “the pandemic was over” — a fairy tale coming from elites so backwards, so stupid, that they were completely scientifically illiterate two years into a pandemic, and worse, proud of their ignorance — America was completely and totally unprepared for an explosive new wave of a pandemic to hit its shores. All that, even though it had weeks to prepare, which is a veritable eternity for disaster management. So…nothing happened…at the precise moment that preparations needed to be made…because by now, all of Washington DC believed in the narrative. Covid was over! Hurray! Let’s declare victory! Oh, wait. Here, have some Omicron for Christmas.

Biden’s team believed in the narrative. Jen Psaki, who has all the warmth of a barracuda, didn’t warn the nation of another wave that was obviously going to hit just as the winter did. Neither did Joe himself. As much as I like the guy, and I give him credit where it’s due, this time, his administration bungled it. Because they bought the narrative being pushed by every third-rate, scientifically illiterate pundit under the sun.

Meanwhile, their own medical experts stayed weirdly silent, too — for a very good reason: they were probably too scared to say much, because you can’t challenge the narrative, or you risk your own career, credibility, job, fame, position in the elite, instantly pilloried and attacked and mocked and hated by the putative wise men and women running the country into the goddamned ground.

They reacted too late. They now-famously ordered tests…that still won’t get here for another who knows when. They didn’t have a plan. Not even an iota of one.

Listen. Hear me, friends, Romans, and countrymen and women and nonbinaries. Merry Christmas to you all, but. But. Covid is going to be with us for a long time to come. Waves are most likely going to strike every winter, right on schedule. Sometimes, in the summers, too. Every nation should have a plan. Every doctor and scientist and vaguely sane person knows this. A plan for what to do — immediately — when a new variant of concern is detected. How many more Christmases do you want ruined?

A plan that can be whipped out at light speed. It’s not rocket science at this point. Boosters — like that. In America? I still can’t get one — it hasn’t been six months yet, whomp whomp, sad dumb trombone. Social distancing and working from home. We all caught Omicron because though my lovely wife works a desk job at one of America’s finest medical institutions, nobody was allowed to work from home even as Omicron hit. And, yes, lockdowns, too — at least of a limited kind. Gyms, bars, clubs, schools. Sorry — we’re still in the middle of a pandemic.

Maybe you don’t agree with the points of my plan. That’s OK. What’s eminently clear is that every nation should have a plan. On file. In their back pocket. Something they can put into operation at a socials scale immediately when the WHO — you know, actual scientists — and doctors and medical experts all agree that a new wave is rising. Despite what scientifically illterate elites and pundits “think” and opine and “believe,” because, well, by now what we should all be beginning to understand is that this class of people don’t know how to think very well at all.

Scientific and economic and social illiterates who are aggressively ignorant about literally everything they have ever opined on of have no business whatsoever defining the narratives which go onto to determine and shape an entire nation’s sociopolitical possibilities. Hell, my plumber would literally have done a better job preparing America for the Omicron wave he knew was coming than all of America’s elites actually did put together. My plumber can fix a leak and knows basic science. Smart guy? Normal guy. America’s elites can’t and don’t do either of those things. They don’t do anything useful — in fact, they prevent anything useful getting done, with fairy tales, which are called “narratives,” and their only real job is creating these fairy tales.

Nations should not be caught flat-footed and reactive. They should act well in advance of the new wave arriving on their shores. There should obviously be emergency plans for waves of Covid that we all know are coming. The only people in American society who thought there weren’t and didn’t need to be are the ones, unfortunately, who have all the power, the power to shape the narrative, and define what’s politically possible or not. The illiterates hold the rest of us hostage, and I’m not even talking about the Trumpists, I’m talking about elites who haven’t read a book since 1992.

Hence, having had its future determined by the stone-cold stupid narrative of scientifically illiterate elites with Soviet levels of smug incompetence compounding their shattering ignorance — the pandemic’s over!! Yay!! All we have to do is say so!! — America did nothing. It didn’t lift a finger to prepare for Omicron. It didn’t have a plan of any kind. It didn’t even have Covid tests. Forget about masks and distancing and working from home and so on. What happened in the vacuum of any kind of real governance and leadership?

Panic and chaos did. Americans didn’t know what to do. Flights were cancelled. Nobody much could get a test. Everybody knew somebody who’d just gotten sick. Now what? Nobody knew. It wasn’t the average person’s fault. They didn’t have any guidance or orientation in a bewildering, frightening situation — an explosive new wave of Covid. They were left, as usual, to fend for themselves.

And all that was because of how America really works. The narrative runs America. And nobody can go up against the narrative, without risking their public credibility and esteem and image and so forth — not you, not me, not even a President.

Unfortunately for the rest of America, the people who craft “the narrative” — elites in positions of power like the New York Times and CNN and whatnot — are the among history’s most ignorant people. They’ve been wrong about almost everything there is to be wrong about — economics, politics, now public health. They are completely illiterate — scientifically, economically, logically — and proud of it. They have never once cited a scientific paper, because I doubt most of them even know what such a thing is. They do not know how to think, and so they don’t even grasp the basics of things like “Covid is a virus which recombines at light speed, we know that for a scientific fact, so the waves aren’t going to just stop magically just because.” Hence, fairy tales like “the pandemic’s over” — literally days before Omicron struck.

The Biden administration, sadly, bought the narrative. I can’t say I really blame them. Nobody can go up against it. I can’t — like I said, give it two minutes if I publish something against the narrative on whatever topic, and New York Times columnists will be hurling playground insults at me, instead of discussing science, facts, logic, evidence, or reason. So imagine the sh*t Biden would have gotten three weeks ago if he’d warned, this pandemic isn’t over. Imagine what all those smug pundits who’ve never read a scientific paper would have said. Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.

That’s cold comfort, and it sounds like an apologia. It isn’t. Sadly, America bungling Covid yet again will be laid at the door of the Commander-in-Chief. Ultimately, it is the head of state’s responsibility to prepare a society for disasters and emergencies, to ancticipate and plan for them, not just react to them after it’s too late.

Biden listened to the narrative, and it was a huge mistake. But where does it leave a nation, when nobody — not even the President — can challenge the consensus reality of the narrative, fairy tales written by idiots…who are proud of their own ignorance…illiterate at anything real, useful, thoughtful…because they have all the power?

America’s elites bungled Covid yet again, my friends. They ruined Christmas. Millions of Americans are probably pretty angry right about now. They should be. Because the question all this raises is: have these hopeless, epic ignoramuses learned anything yet? And the answer, sadly, goes like this: nope, they never do, because they don’t have to. Why would they? They got away with it again, being wrong, pushing a fairy tale that led to disaster, panic and chaos. And so…they’re going to bungle Covid next time around, too.

Hopefully by then maybe the rest of us will have learned to make a few contingency plans of our own, if only for the sake of having a decent Christmas. Me? I’m grateful that me, my wife, mom, and the dog are here together, even if three of us have Covid. I’m grateful it’s relatively mild. We’re having a nice time, full of love and grace and goodness. But man, has my contempt for America’s elites — elites who refuse to do anything but peddle fairy tales and attack anyone who tries to correct them — reached boiling point, too.

Umair
December 2021