The First Casualty Of The Pandemic Is Friendship

If “the first casualty of war is the truth” the first casualty of a pandemic is friendship. Early in the pandemic, a long time friend posted on Facebook (yes, I know, not a place for nuanced discourse) that any friends of his who would not take the vaccine were evil and he wanted nothing to do with them. This included people who had been in his life for decades. Another friend, who bravely decided against vaccination, in addition to being locked out of the normal discourse of social life – in Australia, the unvaccinated were legally prohibited from participating in normal everyday life, and those legal prohibitions were defended with the vigor of war – was shunned by her social group and lost half a dozen good friends over the course of the pandemic.

The above are two small examples of the unintentional fall-out of very intentional policies designed to produce unthinking obedience to authoritarian dictates that had no justification in science or ethics. Those of us who have somehow managed to come through the pervasive fog of extreme media and publicity questioning not only the legitimacy of pandemic madness but the efficacy of draconian lockdowns and forced vaccination are going to be disappointed. There will never be a full scale accounting of the costs to society of the “psy ops” that permeated the pandemic. Billions of dollars were and continue to be funnelled into the coffers of pharmaceutical companies for vaccines that started out with promises of “preventing 95% of infections,” and have over time dwindled to “may prevent severe illness.” In reality, it’s clear that these same vaccinations have caused considerable morbidity and mortality in healthy individuals never at risk for disease. I have not even mentioned the additional billions going towards anti-viral medications with well documented side effects and poor efficacy.

In the west, inflation runs rampant, driven almost entirely by the billions of dollars of stimulus and lowering of interest rates to well below notional zero that was required to maintain lockdowns. Without stimulus payments, the public would never have agreed to being locked into their homes 23 hours per day to combat a virus that had a infection fatality rate of less than 1%. Now, to curb inflation, the heads of central banks around the world are committed to raising interest rates (not inherently a bad thing) likely until recession hits, resulting in job loss and increasing economic hardship for the poorest people in society. The rich have, and continue to, profit from the pandemic which has seen the largest upward migration of wealth since tracking such measures began.

And then there are the burgeoning mental health issues, the domestic violence, the predictable increase in other causes of morbidity and mortality which ran upwards unchecked throughout the pandemic causing, in highly vaccinated countries, the greatest increase in mortality for decades.

In some ways, the bigger scale issues are harder for us small scale humans to grasp, but most of us can grab hold of the extreme polarisation that has come to define any and all discussions of covid going forward. Personally, I never discuss pandemic management or the covid “vaccine” with any of the people I know in real life. The conversations are too fraught and damaging. Most people probably sit somewhere in the now miniscule middle range, but others believe wholeheartedly that those of us who oppose vaccine mandates, ineffective masking, lockdowns and discrimination are quite literally evil and are willing to kill for our right to not vaccinate and/or mask. This mindset has been perpetuated by Twitter posts (often by Blue Check credentialed individuals) that, for example, Covid is the third leading cause of death (it’s not, a simple search will reveal that cancer remains the leading cause of death in Australia, diabetes, in fact, kills more Australians than covid) or that not wearing a mask is tantamount to killing the vulnerable.

Whether or not the world is entering a Klaus Schwab orchestrated Great Reset, on a smaller scale we have certainly entered into the “Great Friend Reset” (many thanks to Andy Kirkpatrick for coining this phrase) wherein disagreements over pandemic management have forged irrepairable rifts in personal relationships because people on either side of the now great pandemic divide are unable to cope with the messy but real grey middle ground. In a divisive world, it is more important now than ever to understand that we can disagree with respect and without fear. My interpretation of the available data does not denigrate yours anymore than your interpretation invalidates mine. We are all ultimately powerless in the management of the pandemic, but if we give either side of the debate the power to enduce such fear and helplessness in ourselves that we turn real friends into enemies we may be crossing a rubicon into a new world that is ultimately more harmful to our essential humanity than the one we left.

I am not by any measure a religious or even spiritual person but there is some wisdom in these words:

forgive us our trespasses,/ as we forgive those who trespass against us,

especially if our only trespass is to hold a differing opinion.

Hard Things update: day 25 was a knackering weight workout, day 26 was the upwind/downwind vomit run, day 27 was taking only cold showers, and day 28 (today) is adhering to the Carnivore diet.