Dr. Cifu, I truly appreciate your willingness to continue to humbly discuss and reflect on what happened during COVID. And learn from all the actions, decisions, mandates, coercion, and isolation.
But most of all judgement. The judgement that began when the message was that we should be fearful which led to being scared of all human interactions...we were sold the message that if we could just isolate ourselves enough to not interact, we would never get COVID. The zero-COVID myth that many hung onto for 2+ years. Way too long.
"Carlinness" is a beautiful illustration of what judgement is and why it is wrong. We have to stop judging others for being [selfish, naive, ignorant, reckless, stupid, authoritative, etc. insert your favorite condescending word here], look within, and find common ground.
I just learned about a poet, Sam Walter Foss, and a beautiful poem called "A house by the side of the road" written in 1897. The medical/healthcare community could learn a lot from its humility.
Good as always. I’d offer a couple of other thoughts. Firstly, I maintain it takes roughly 20 years to truly understand history. It often takes a new generation, uncontaminated by the event, to dispassionately understand it. Secondly we were able to keep the public in the dark about the inability of modern medicine to do anything meaningful about treatment. Our hospitals were simply charnel houses. We sprinkled this and that at the very ill and nothing made a meaningful difference. We were all frustrated yet the public were and are unaware.
Thank you for the Francis Collins quote, it was new to me. I had held him in very high esteem for many years & that esteem took a beating during the pandemic .
I googled the quote & learned that he made that statement publically in 2023 expanded upon it in his book "The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust"
I appreciate his humility & honesty which has helped restore my respect for him. To my knowledge, Facuci and most other PH officials have not 'recanted".
When folks such as John Ionnides & Jay Battacharia are viewed as enemies for simply calling into question the response or presenting real world data on the virus then it is not simply a matter of decision makers trying to do the right thing. The government types became entrenched in their narrative and became thugs to anyone presenting or even suggesting a different approach. Decades of protocol established for dealing with this type of situation were simply ignored. People need to be held accountable and removed from positions of influence in these matters.
I have had many thoughts about the pandemic over the years. At this point I feel like I have lingering, low-grade PTSD. I felt I’d put the pandemic behind me but I’m surprised how emotional I feel while writing this.
I started out my Covid-19 experience as the Clinical Director of a small 120-bed treatment program for parolees & county probationers with mental health and/or substance use disorders when I got a call from a friend in a large healthcare system in the county desperate to locate substitute doctors to fill in for severely doctors taxed in their hospitals. I checked with my program and they were willing to give me several late afternoons and evenings to help, so I sent them a CV and arranged a day to start.
On the day I arrived at the ER, I told told them who I was, was told I was expected, and was met by a woman who cautiously inquired why I was in scrubs. "I was told that I was working in the ER." "You're the new MSW, are you not?" "I'm the new doctor with an MSW, yes." "Oh, we weren't told that. Let me call Dr. [ my friend]." She returned & put me on the phone to a very apologetic friend, who then asked if I would see the numerous families who invariably were waiting to speak with a physician about their family member in the ICU, AND if I could also supervize the psychiatry residents and social work interns who were floating around basically unguided and unsure of exactly what to do. The thought immediately entered my mind of Sidney, the hapless psychiatrist from the 80's TV series MASH, who on occasion wandered into the operating room to "help." "Sure, no problem," I told him, as I had, after all, volunteered to ease the burden. I asked the social work supervisor to direct me to the residents and interns, held a short meeting, grabbed an iPad, read records, and headed to the family waiting room to discuss patient status with family members individually & separately, with several of my students in tow. I allowed five or so minutes between cases for impressions & questions. At the shift change, we say down and actually discussed cases.
I practice the principle of the "instillation of hope" whenever possible, yet we had very, very sick patients, and very, very frightened families, so I always did the best I could. It was heartbreaking, exhausting work from the moment I arrived to moment I left, day after day. I tried to share a meal with the students in the evenings, anything to support one another. It is not an experience I look back upon necessarily with fondness. I have had better opportunity for personal growth.
I had a really hard time during the pandemic, and I didn’t even get sick until September 2023, after being deprived of sleep at the end of traveling. What I find most troubling is that most public health authorities, in the US and many other countries, advised a thousand stupid things about NPIs, but were completely silent about improving or maintaining general health. Never a word was spoken about sleep, diet, sun exposure, or exercise. Only warnings about masks, distance, handwashing, and eventually endless boosting, were repeated constantly. I’m glad that I started to learn a little bit about evidence-based medicine, and at least I now know a few of the right questions to ask.
I always enjoy Adam's musings. However, he disappoints me by not addressing the profound loss of trust in the general population for vaccines and our medical system itself. My expertise was in lung transplantation. There has been a clear decline in the willingness of our fellow citizens to agree to donating loved one's organs for transplantation leading to hundred and probably thousands of unnecessary death. The perspectives of our fellow readers on Substack embrace many over-generalizations about vaccines, Big Pharma, and our healthcare system. We need a thoughtful campaign of how to rebuild trust within the American public for most things medical.
The saddest part of the pandemic were steps taken by government ( state, local, and federal ) to restrict doctor's ability to treat the disease if it didn't align with a certain protocol.
I understand the criticisms but don't share the anger and contempt for people (both high and low) who honestly, earnestly, if naively, pursued the "precautionary principle" (if something causes a plausible threat of serious harm to public health or the environment, protective measures should be taken even without full scientific certainty). There was no certainty on either side and maybe there still isn't except in the minds of angry, contemptuous people, often with an ideological bias against elites, governments, etc. The knight-errants who erred on the side of caution without calculating its (at-the-time unknown) costs, are now matched I believe, by people who perhaps (I can't know for sure myself) underestimate the benefits achieved.
Think of this, readers and admirers of Dr. Cifu (I am one). He and others like Prasad have persuasively exposed a huge portion of the medical profession for its gross scientific ignorance and blind irresponsibility and active perpetuation of them over time at great iatrogenic cost, often--perfidiously--for monetary advantage in alliance with the pharmaceutical and medical device industries and their paid defenders and enablers in Congress. (Still can't quite digest Prasad getting on the Trump/RFKJr. train--it has many cars I'm sure he wouldn't want to ride in.)
So, please, maybe hold back a little bit with your anger and contempt at laypeople lacking medical and methodological training who made bad decisions with good intentions with experts' backing, and didn't follow or understand as-yet-uncertain but putatively excellent evidence-based criticisms of what they were doing, often broadcast not by scientists but by cherry-picking partisans in a tribalized political environment. People who were CONVINCED of the value of hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, injection of bleach into veins, and then shining of artificial light where the sun don't shine (there might be a good Latin medical term for that). As Aristotle said (I paraphrase), to evaluate the truth of something said, it helps to know something about who said it. By the way, an argument against "Dark Money" (fossil fuel, pharmaceutical, financial) in electoral politics and lobbying. Full disclosure: I'm a liberal Democrat, so take what I say and divide by 2 (or multiply by -2) if you're not.
You really didn't need to confess to being a liberal Democrat - that was clear. And interesting that you still filter your human response to a global medical event through the lens of politics - and emotional, angry politics at that. That truly was the disappointing part of the pandemic. Watching otherwise intelligent people let emotion, fear, and almost overarching hatred of a particular person color and twist their response to everything. Physicians giving up on data to oppose said person. The endless virtue signaling at every turn - the virtue signal that fixated on masks and rarely mentioned hand washing. The virtues of the endless boosters. To suggest that people mainly functioned with "good intentions" is suspect. The fact that you still throw out the hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin. Who cares? Bringing up "bleach injected into veins?" Nothing more than a brief virtue signal opportunity. How about the endless boosters? When Fauci himself said "I've had the vaccine, 6 boosters and Covid 3 times" - maybe hinted at how effective those were. It quickly became obvious.
Dr Prasad has many good reviews of the unending parade of virtue signal opportunities throughout the pandemic. The data just wasn't there. If you questioned anything the term "misinformation" was lobbed.
I went through the pandemic in a wonderfully calm manner. The main strategy was just not caring what other people did. Plenty of ways to keep oneself safe and healthy - didn't need to police the area for who was or was not wearing a mask. Accepting that life happens and we can't control everything was really the key to maintaining perspective.
The main tragedy continues to be how we managed the children of this country. We allowed the antics of adults (whether acting from fear, political emotion, or a sense that the world/nature/viruses are just much more controllable then they really are) to upend what was in the best interests of children. We disrupted learning that just won't be made up, stimulated a base of anxiety that lingers.
And I do agree with trying to evaluate the truth of something said by understanding something about who said it. Exactly.
My anger has nothing to do with "people (both high and low) who honestly, earnestly, if naively, pursued the 'precautionary principle'". My anger is with the fact that many of these people then proceeded to demonize legitimate opposing points of view instead of addressing them, ignore (or even suppress) data that didn't fit their preferred narratives instead of incorporating them into their decisions, and then once reality refused to cooperate, unironically and conveniently retreated into claiming that they "made the best decision based on the best information available at the time". It's amazing: who could have known that creating an echo chamber could lead to bad decisions! Yet of course they took zero responsibility for that.
Any system that tolerates and even rewards incompetence is a system that's doomed to fail. That's what was most frightening to me about the pandemic: the complete and utter lack of consequence for most of the leaders who made objectively bad decisions. And look at what happened to the few leaders who stepped up, shunned groupthink, and made the tough, but ultimately proven correct decisions. They were "honestly and earnestly" pilloried by opposing leaders and media at the time. And then when they were proven right, their opponents conveniently acted as if they didn't exist! If outcomes like this don't get you angry, I'm not sure what will.
Thanks so much for the thoughtful note, Peter. As you imply, COVID we still mostly see from based on who we are and what we experienced. It'll be interested to see how we evolve. (BTW, I really love "Trump/RFKJr. train--it has many cars I'm sure he wouldn't want to ride in.) "
Thank you for this essay. I am a physician and I am mortified by what political advocacy by medical experts, rather than dispassionate and scientific analysis, has done to the trust people had in medicine. Vaccines are one of the all-time great and durable developments in public health, and the bogus claims about the efficacy of the Covid vaccines, and the draconian efforts to strongarm the public into accepting them, has tainted that trust such that even "normal people" are starting to doubt them. Lying to patients (as Dr. Fauci did, saying it was for our own good) is never a good idea. Very hard to regain trust
Just this morning I was reminiscing about the pandemic days with my coworkers. A fear that comes up is that next time it won't be taken as seriously and it will be a worse virus. People may actually be less likely to follow or trust the science.
If the "powers at be" who will tell me to mask, vaccinate, stand 6 feet away actually do the studies and debrief through the lies of covid-19, maybe I will listen. But so much was a lie, until then, no. I may stay home and collect pay for starting a sourdough loaf or raising chickens instead of working all but 2 days when I closed my outpatient PT clinic and realized this was a big joke and opened again.
I'm a lay person and not a medical professional. The lack of common sense displayed during the pandemic was astounding, not to mention the lack of critical scientific thinking. The biggest loss in all of this is the loss of trust. Once lost, that is very hard to get back. There have been countless advances in medicine in the last 100 years, including vaccines. However, Covid mandates now have many questioning even sound medical interventions. I don't know how long it will take to repair the damage that has been done.
Hopefully enough people drew the proper conclusions from the covid episode to prevent a repeat performance. Seeing people with masks, social distancing, and wiping down surfaces with disinfectants revealed a primitive level of thinking that I didn't think possible in the 21st century. Often dismissed as "conspiracy theory", the whole thing was actually gamed out in great detail months in advance in exercises such as Crimson Contagion and Event 201. Both are still available for review on the internet. The latter even claimed as their infectious agent a coronavirus from a bat in a Chinese wet market. The usual suspects from the public health industry (DHS, CDC, WHO, Johns Hopkins university, Gates Foundation, etc.) set up and financed these exercises. Their recommendations were for more funding and coercive powers for these organizations.
Thank you for your transparency. For me, it was being ostracized by those in fields that I had previously admired. I am very passionate about genuine informed consent, which cannot occur in the presence of mandates, coercion, or enticement-all of which happened. NPIs were imposed on people without their input or consent, as were many other interventions. I discovered that many are not really independent thinkers and are quite willing to sacrifice their neighbor's right to make their own health decisions. Sadly, many were and still are happy to demonize people for "wrong think." Unfortunately, I think that most people will react exactly the same way should another crisis emerge.
Dr. Cifu, I truly appreciate your willingness to continue to humbly discuss and reflect on what happened during COVID. And learn from all the actions, decisions, mandates, coercion, and isolation.
But most of all judgement. The judgement that began when the message was that we should be fearful which led to being scared of all human interactions...we were sold the message that if we could just isolate ourselves enough to not interact, we would never get COVID. The zero-COVID myth that many hung onto for 2+ years. Way too long.
"Carlinness" is a beautiful illustration of what judgement is and why it is wrong. We have to stop judging others for being [selfish, naive, ignorant, reckless, stupid, authoritative, etc. insert your favorite condescending word here], look within, and find common ground.
I just learned about a poet, Sam Walter Foss, and a beautiful poem called "A house by the side of the road" written in 1897. The medical/healthcare community could learn a lot from its humility.
Here is an excerpt:
There are hermit souls that live withdrawn
In the place of their self-content;
There are souls like stars, that dwell apart,
In a fellowless firmament;
There are pioneer souls that blaze the paths
Where highways never ran-
But let me live by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.
Let me live in a house by the side of the road
Where the race of men go by-
The men who are good and the men who are bad,
As good and as bad as I.
I would not sit in the scorner's seat
Nor hurl the cynic's ban-
Let me live in a house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.
I see from my house by the side of the road
By the side of the highway of life,
The men who press with the ardor of hope,
The men who are faint with the strife,
But I turn not away from their smiles and tears,
Both parts of an infinite plan-
Let me live in a house by the side of the road
And be a friend to man.
Good as always. I’d offer a couple of other thoughts. Firstly, I maintain it takes roughly 20 years to truly understand history. It often takes a new generation, uncontaminated by the event, to dispassionately understand it. Secondly we were able to keep the public in the dark about the inability of modern medicine to do anything meaningful about treatment. Our hospitals were simply charnel houses. We sprinkled this and that at the very ill and nothing made a meaningful difference. We were all frustrated yet the public were and are unaware.
Thank you for the Francis Collins quote, it was new to me. I had held him in very high esteem for many years & that esteem took a beating during the pandemic .
I googled the quote & learned that he made that statement publically in 2023 expanded upon it in his book "The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust"
(https://christianscholars.com/a-review-of-the-road-to-wisdom-on-truth-science-faith-and-trust ).
I appreciate his humility & honesty which has helped restore my respect for him. To my knowledge, Facuci and most other PH officials have not 'recanted".
When folks such as John Ionnides & Jay Battacharia are viewed as enemies for simply calling into question the response or presenting real world data on the virus then it is not simply a matter of decision makers trying to do the right thing. The government types became entrenched in their narrative and became thugs to anyone presenting or even suggesting a different approach. Decades of protocol established for dealing with this type of situation were simply ignored. People need to be held accountable and removed from positions of influence in these matters.
I have had many thoughts about the pandemic over the years. At this point I feel like I have lingering, low-grade PTSD. I felt I’d put the pandemic behind me but I’m surprised how emotional I feel while writing this.
This is an excellent, thoughtful piece -- I'd expect no less from you!
For me, those two years were the hardest of my career, bar none. https://blogs.nejm.org/hiv-id-observations/index.php/two-pandemics-compared-reflections-on-hiv-and-covid-19/2025/07/07/
I started out my Covid-19 experience as the Clinical Director of a small 120-bed treatment program for parolees & county probationers with mental health and/or substance use disorders when I got a call from a friend in a large healthcare system in the county desperate to locate substitute doctors to fill in for severely doctors taxed in their hospitals. I checked with my program and they were willing to give me several late afternoons and evenings to help, so I sent them a CV and arranged a day to start.
On the day I arrived at the ER, I told told them who I was, was told I was expected, and was met by a woman who cautiously inquired why I was in scrubs. "I was told that I was working in the ER." "You're the new MSW, are you not?" "I'm the new doctor with an MSW, yes." "Oh, we weren't told that. Let me call Dr. [ my friend]." She returned & put me on the phone to a very apologetic friend, who then asked if I would see the numerous families who invariably were waiting to speak with a physician about their family member in the ICU, AND if I could also supervize the psychiatry residents and social work interns who were floating around basically unguided and unsure of exactly what to do. The thought immediately entered my mind of Sidney, the hapless psychiatrist from the 80's TV series MASH, who on occasion wandered into the operating room to "help." "Sure, no problem," I told him, as I had, after all, volunteered to ease the burden. I asked the social work supervisor to direct me to the residents and interns, held a short meeting, grabbed an iPad, read records, and headed to the family waiting room to discuss patient status with family members individually & separately, with several of my students in tow. I allowed five or so minutes between cases for impressions & questions. At the shift change, we say down and actually discussed cases.
I practice the principle of the "instillation of hope" whenever possible, yet we had very, very sick patients, and very, very frightened families, so I always did the best I could. It was heartbreaking, exhausting work from the moment I arrived to moment I left, day after day. I tried to share a meal with the students in the evenings, anything to support one another. It is not an experience I look back upon necessarily with fondness. I have had better opportunity for personal growth.
I had a really hard time during the pandemic, and I didn’t even get sick until September 2023, after being deprived of sleep at the end of traveling. What I find most troubling is that most public health authorities, in the US and many other countries, advised a thousand stupid things about NPIs, but were completely silent about improving or maintaining general health. Never a word was spoken about sleep, diet, sun exposure, or exercise. Only warnings about masks, distance, handwashing, and eventually endless boosting, were repeated constantly. I’m glad that I started to learn a little bit about evidence-based medicine, and at least I now know a few of the right questions to ask.
I always enjoy Adam's musings. However, he disappoints me by not addressing the profound loss of trust in the general population for vaccines and our medical system itself. My expertise was in lung transplantation. There has been a clear decline in the willingness of our fellow citizens to agree to donating loved one's organs for transplantation leading to hundred and probably thousands of unnecessary death. The perspectives of our fellow readers on Substack embrace many over-generalizations about vaccines, Big Pharma, and our healthcare system. We need a thoughtful campaign of how to rebuild trust within the American public for most things medical.
Good point. Thanks.
The saddest part of the pandemic were steps taken by government ( state, local, and federal ) to restrict doctor's ability to treat the disease if it didn't align with a certain protocol.
I understand the criticisms but don't share the anger and contempt for people (both high and low) who honestly, earnestly, if naively, pursued the "precautionary principle" (if something causes a plausible threat of serious harm to public health or the environment, protective measures should be taken even without full scientific certainty). There was no certainty on either side and maybe there still isn't except in the minds of angry, contemptuous people, often with an ideological bias against elites, governments, etc. The knight-errants who erred on the side of caution without calculating its (at-the-time unknown) costs, are now matched I believe, by people who perhaps (I can't know for sure myself) underestimate the benefits achieved.
Think of this, readers and admirers of Dr. Cifu (I am one). He and others like Prasad have persuasively exposed a huge portion of the medical profession for its gross scientific ignorance and blind irresponsibility and active perpetuation of them over time at great iatrogenic cost, often--perfidiously--for monetary advantage in alliance with the pharmaceutical and medical device industries and their paid defenders and enablers in Congress. (Still can't quite digest Prasad getting on the Trump/RFKJr. train--it has many cars I'm sure he wouldn't want to ride in.)
So, please, maybe hold back a little bit with your anger and contempt at laypeople lacking medical and methodological training who made bad decisions with good intentions with experts' backing, and didn't follow or understand as-yet-uncertain but putatively excellent evidence-based criticisms of what they were doing, often broadcast not by scientists but by cherry-picking partisans in a tribalized political environment. People who were CONVINCED of the value of hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, injection of bleach into veins, and then shining of artificial light where the sun don't shine (there might be a good Latin medical term for that). As Aristotle said (I paraphrase), to evaluate the truth of something said, it helps to know something about who said it. By the way, an argument against "Dark Money" (fossil fuel, pharmaceutical, financial) in electoral politics and lobbying. Full disclosure: I'm a liberal Democrat, so take what I say and divide by 2 (or multiply by -2) if you're not.
You really didn't need to confess to being a liberal Democrat - that was clear. And interesting that you still filter your human response to a global medical event through the lens of politics - and emotional, angry politics at that. That truly was the disappointing part of the pandemic. Watching otherwise intelligent people let emotion, fear, and almost overarching hatred of a particular person color and twist their response to everything. Physicians giving up on data to oppose said person. The endless virtue signaling at every turn - the virtue signal that fixated on masks and rarely mentioned hand washing. The virtues of the endless boosters. To suggest that people mainly functioned with "good intentions" is suspect. The fact that you still throw out the hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin. Who cares? Bringing up "bleach injected into veins?" Nothing more than a brief virtue signal opportunity. How about the endless boosters? When Fauci himself said "I've had the vaccine, 6 boosters and Covid 3 times" - maybe hinted at how effective those were. It quickly became obvious.
Dr Prasad has many good reviews of the unending parade of virtue signal opportunities throughout the pandemic. The data just wasn't there. If you questioned anything the term "misinformation" was lobbed.
I went through the pandemic in a wonderfully calm manner. The main strategy was just not caring what other people did. Plenty of ways to keep oneself safe and healthy - didn't need to police the area for who was or was not wearing a mask. Accepting that life happens and we can't control everything was really the key to maintaining perspective.
The main tragedy continues to be how we managed the children of this country. We allowed the antics of adults (whether acting from fear, political emotion, or a sense that the world/nature/viruses are just much more controllable then they really are) to upend what was in the best interests of children. We disrupted learning that just won't be made up, stimulated a base of anxiety that lingers.
And I do agree with trying to evaluate the truth of something said by understanding something about who said it. Exactly.
My anger has nothing to do with "people (both high and low) who honestly, earnestly, if naively, pursued the 'precautionary principle'". My anger is with the fact that many of these people then proceeded to demonize legitimate opposing points of view instead of addressing them, ignore (or even suppress) data that didn't fit their preferred narratives instead of incorporating them into their decisions, and then once reality refused to cooperate, unironically and conveniently retreated into claiming that they "made the best decision based on the best information available at the time". It's amazing: who could have known that creating an echo chamber could lead to bad decisions! Yet of course they took zero responsibility for that.
Any system that tolerates and even rewards incompetence is a system that's doomed to fail. That's what was most frightening to me about the pandemic: the complete and utter lack of consequence for most of the leaders who made objectively bad decisions. And look at what happened to the few leaders who stepped up, shunned groupthink, and made the tough, but ultimately proven correct decisions. They were "honestly and earnestly" pilloried by opposing leaders and media at the time. And then when they were proven right, their opponents conveniently acted as if they didn't exist! If outcomes like this don't get you angry, I'm not sure what will.
Thanks so much for the thoughtful note, Peter. As you imply, COVID we still mostly see from based on who we are and what we experienced. It'll be interested to see how we evolve. (BTW, I really love "Trump/RFKJr. train--it has many cars I'm sure he wouldn't want to ride in.) "
Thank you for this essay. I am a physician and I am mortified by what political advocacy by medical experts, rather than dispassionate and scientific analysis, has done to the trust people had in medicine. Vaccines are one of the all-time great and durable developments in public health, and the bogus claims about the efficacy of the Covid vaccines, and the draconian efforts to strongarm the public into accepting them, has tainted that trust such that even "normal people" are starting to doubt them. Lying to patients (as Dr. Fauci did, saying it was for our own good) is never a good idea. Very hard to regain trust
Just this morning I was reminiscing about the pandemic days with my coworkers. A fear that comes up is that next time it won't be taken as seriously and it will be a worse virus. People may actually be less likely to follow or trust the science.
If the "powers at be" who will tell me to mask, vaccinate, stand 6 feet away actually do the studies and debrief through the lies of covid-19, maybe I will listen. But so much was a lie, until then, no. I may stay home and collect pay for starting a sourdough loaf or raising chickens instead of working all but 2 days when I closed my outpatient PT clinic and realized this was a big joke and opened again.
Ya, like I said if the next one is worse we’re all doomed.
I'm a lay person and not a medical professional. The lack of common sense displayed during the pandemic was astounding, not to mention the lack of critical scientific thinking. The biggest loss in all of this is the loss of trust. Once lost, that is very hard to get back. There have been countless advances in medicine in the last 100 years, including vaccines. However, Covid mandates now have many questioning even sound medical interventions. I don't know how long it will take to repair the damage that has been done.
Not to mention the lack of humility displayed by PH officials during & after the crisis.
Hopefully enough people drew the proper conclusions from the covid episode to prevent a repeat performance. Seeing people with masks, social distancing, and wiping down surfaces with disinfectants revealed a primitive level of thinking that I didn't think possible in the 21st century. Often dismissed as "conspiracy theory", the whole thing was actually gamed out in great detail months in advance in exercises such as Crimson Contagion and Event 201. Both are still available for review on the internet. The latter even claimed as their infectious agent a coronavirus from a bat in a Chinese wet market. The usual suspects from the public health industry (DHS, CDC, WHO, Johns Hopkins university, Gates Foundation, etc.) set up and financed these exercises. Their recommendations were for more funding and coercive powers for these organizations.
Thank you for your transparency. For me, it was being ostracized by those in fields that I had previously admired. I am very passionate about genuine informed consent, which cannot occur in the presence of mandates, coercion, or enticement-all of which happened. NPIs were imposed on people without their input or consent, as were many other interventions. I discovered that many are not really independent thinkers and are quite willing to sacrifice their neighbor's right to make their own health decisions. Sadly, many were and still are happy to demonize people for "wrong think." Unfortunately, I think that most people will react exactly the same way should another crisis emerge.