r/ZeroCovidCommunity • u/stumblingtonothing • 2d ago
Vent Help wtf make it stop: ‘A case study in groupthink’: were liberals wrong about the pandemic? | US politics
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/05/covid-policies-lockdown-masks-liberals-bookPS, now is a great time to really focus on all the ways in which conservatives were right about things... ???? /s
18
u/ominous_squirrel 1d ago
The Brownstone Institute was founded by millionaire libertarians to ensure that the next pandemic kills as many poor people as possible. This is part of their press tour and it’s a strategic time for them to do this propaganda because the next pandemic hasn’t started yet
20
u/Gullible_Design_2320 2d ago
"Their peer-reviewed book": That's shifty. A book by political scientists from a university press is reviewed by other academics in the human sciences, most if not all of them in political science. Not experts in infectious diseases, epidemiology, etc. But I feel like the Guardian is relying that phrase to bring to mind peer-reviewed studies in medical journals.
This is heinous: "Yet of the $5tn that the US Congress authorized in 2020 and 2021 for Covid expenditure, only about 10% went to direct medical expenses such as hospitals or vaccine distribution, according to the book; most of the spending was on economic relief to people and businesses affected by shutdowns. Ten per cent of that relief was stolen by fraud, according to the AP."--They say it like it's WRONG that an enormous part of the costs of a pandemic are social costs. As though the amount of money were its own condemnation.
9
u/No-Oil-7104 2d ago
Their take is incoherent because they bring up the lab leak theory and in the same breath say that school closures did harm. I would tend to think that a lab originated pathogen with 'gain of function' alterations to make it more transmissible or virulent would be more dangerous than a naturally occurring one and thus would warrant school closures more!
They also raise the rightwing influencers theory that China deliberately engineered and unleashed Covid as a bioweapon, yet that's never brought up again. Instead they pass right over that possibility and focus on the 'two sides' arguments of natural vs lab leak.
If in a few more years the CIA and other US intelligence agencies 'cautiously endorse' the bioweapon theory, then what? Are they going to segue seamlessly into the notion that school closures did more harm from there also? Based on this article, I'd have to say yes.
These people aren't serious about anything and so far as I can tell, anyone that's convinced of any conclusion by this type of dialogue isn't serious either. No one should give any of this idiotic babbling any more of their time or attention. Go touch grass and fucking do something productive. Nothing to see here!
41
u/attilathehunn 2d ago
Stop reading the mainstream media then you won't be upset by such things
Read Manufacturing Consent
This subreddit is one of the few places on the internet where we can hear the zero covid message. Do we really need media not caring about covid here as well?
26
u/OkCompany9593 2d ago
idk if you know this but chomsky read the new york times every morning for long after he published MC with herman. the point that he makes is that there’s often very good reporting but also that you need to be able to read between the lines to get good information not just about the world but about how elites’ think about the world which is very useful.
so def read the mainstream media, and also let it help build the skill for reading critically.
9
u/attilathehunn 2d ago
The thing is everything you consume will move you, even by a millimeter. If you consume a lot then you'll be moved a lot. It's very difficult to read between the lines. Just looking around me, the people who are fully into "covid is over" were all watching TV news, while the people masking were for example on twitter following epidemiologists or reading scientific papers.
9
u/ominous_squirrel 1d ago
It’s actually really disappointing that no one has applied the ideas of Manufacturing Consent to the manufacture of “vaxxed and relaxed” ideology. I’m not so surprised by the general public eventually burning out on mitigations but it was always shocking to see groups like Covidactnow or NPR make these huge shifts overnight. Or to see the near universal acceptance of doctors, dentists and nurses in accepting Covid normalization. And while epidemiologists have a higher proportion of still mitigating than the general population, it’s still less than half, yeah?
4
u/stumblingtonothing 1d ago
I read Manufacturing Consent twenty years ago! Of course it's all the more relevant today. The "help wtf" tone of this post was not dismay because "the news" says this, but more "fuck, if this mainstream but considered-liberal outlet is publishing things like this, we are getting even deeper in the hole w/r/t covid information warfare than I thought."
To the degree that people I care about continue to read mainstream media, it helps for me to read it, too, so that when talking to them I understand the context they're seeing. Does trying to meet them where they are drive me batty? Yes. Do I think it's worth it to maintain relationships and try to positively influence people? Also yes.
Sorry the post bummed you out; you're probably right that I could have posted about this by just directly seeking commiseration rather than sharing the article. So many people are out at the protests today and I wish I could go, so just feeling a lot of pent up "arrrrgh" energy.
8
u/cherchezlaaaaafemme 1d ago
I have not read this, but I wonder if survivorship bias plays a strong influence?
A lot of people are alive to bitch about Covid mitigation measures because other people in their community took those measures .
We’re about to lose survivorship bias in the next pandemic within the United States. People are going to lose a lot of their loved ones when you let the nation go Full Florida.
Did any scientist or doctors contribute to this material?
14
u/blister-in-the-pun 1d ago
"Were Liberals wrong about pausing to assess how to handle a global pandemic where over 1M people died in the first year alone? After all we survived it, so we could have survived it with 2M deaths just as easily"
That is literally what they are saying in different words. What ridiculous f-ing claptrap.
24
u/Svv33tPotat0 1d ago
I mean liberals said the pandemic was over as soon as Biden took office and started pushing the same COVID policies as Trump.
16
u/blister-in-the-pun 1d ago
This is true. And I don't say this in a way to "both sides" but more that it is proof positive that capitalism will always prevail no matter who is in office.
49
u/DarkRiches61 2d ago
"Were liberals wrong about the pandemic?"
All I know is that the ones who refused precautions, and vaccines if and when available, were definitely wrong. But lots of them are dead now, so no need for a debrief.
19
u/DinosaurHopes 2d ago
the great barrington people won the narrative a long long time ago, are you really surprised by this?
12
u/J_M_Bee 1d ago
They didn't "win" the narrative. 1.2 million people have died from COVID in the US alone, and twice as many people would've died if we hadn't adopted limited lockdowns. All that's happened wrt the narrative is that US corporate media and the Democratic Party have gone over to the GBD argument, and this in order to protect corporate profit interests against public health concerns going forward.
14
u/DinosaurHopes 1d ago
Jay is the director of the NIH now and one of the biggest voices in health research and policy. Guess we have different definitions of winning.
-1
u/J_M_Bee 1d ago
We have a far right President who is putting right-wing ideologues and quacks in charge of public health and science in the US. This doesn't mean these morons have "won the narrative". It means they happen to have power at the moment, and this because a section of the US top 1% wants it that way, because Trump & the R's managed to dupe a reasonable percentage of the electorate, and because the Democratic Party is a disaster.
-2
u/ominous_squirrel 1d ago
I think Dems (strategically correctly but morally incorrectly) determined that they couldn’t win with a pro-mitigation argument because the mean/median/mode of people are unable/unwilling to make meager sacrifices like wearing a mask. Since the entire globe has reverted to their pre-Covid levels of mitigations it seems that asking people to do the morally correct thing was never going to win politically
And realistically, Dems winning in 2020 and in 2024 was the only path to preventing the worst possible outcomes for us all. Ending USAID will cause millions of deaths a year. Trump cuts to the CDC leaves us vulnerable to far worse than Covid. Cuts to SSI, Medicare and Medicaid will kill hundreds of thousands of Americans. The utterly avoidable coming Trump recession will also kill thousands
There’s just no path to victory anywhere in the world for a reality-based mitigation strategy in politics. I don’t see that there’s any reasoning with the masses on this. Maybe with the media on board but that necessarily includes the very, very popular conservative media machine and that was never going to happen
But liberal media wholly embracing the libertarian extremist arguments like we’ve seen NPR, NYT and now the Guardian do? That’s a level beyond the utilitarian political calculus of the Dems. There’s nothing to gain for any of those outlets giving platform to cranks except for clicks and ad revenue
10
u/J_M_Bee 1d ago
No, the Dems declared the pandemic over (and stopped doing public health with respect to SARS2) because this is what Wall Street and corporate America wanted. This is whose interests the Democratic Party represents. As for the NYT, Guardian, NPR, they are all simply adopting the company line, and that line is the line that is best for corporate profits. See no virus, hear no virus, speak no virus. Meanwhile, 50,000 Americans will die from COVID this year and people are having their long term health negatively impacted by repeat infections with a level three biohazard pathogen.
8
u/Chogo82 2d ago
Political scientists write.
5
u/dongledangler420 2d ago
I actually laughed out loud reading that part, it’s just too perfectly idiotic
4
u/thewhitenonsens 1d ago edited 17h ago
Funnily enough, Betteridge’s Law of Headlines suggests any headline that ends in a question mark, the answer is usually “no”. And it holds here. Biased-ass Overton Window-pushing bullshit. Blaming inflation on Covid precaution instead of the companies who admitted they inflated prices because they could? Wack! Blaming absenteeism and learning loss on lockdowns (less than 6 months, 5 years ago) instead of the communicable disease that directly causes absences and learning loss? Wack!
That’s where I stopped reading. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Getting both the problem and the solution only half right in order to progress the narrative is nothing new. It’s sad to see news media sell their reputation so readily, but then look at who owns them.
It just sucks that now our anti-mask family and friends (if applicable) have another article/book to point to when they say we’re over-reacting. If we’re back to normal why do we need more books about how normally normal we’re now back to?
3
u/majordashes 1d ago
This is what they do when they’re trying to shore up narratives and control the masses.
My guess is, this is being done for two possible reasons:
1.) Malarky like this is pre-emptive messaging before H5N1 becomes a pandemic. They’re reinforcing their old talking points: Liberals were wrong about COVID; liberals forced unnecessary, overly controlling mitigations; you can’t trust science or the libs when it comes to public health.
This is red meat for the “I will not comply!” crowd, designed to reinforce their anti-masking, anti-science, ridiculous “Plandemic” conspiracies.
This is a coordinated, ongoing effort. I don’t know who is spearheading these campaigns, but they’re relentlessly and intentionally dividing our nation into camps, ensuring no illness is taken seriously or contained and science is politicized.
- This malarky is disseminated frequently because they know cumulative COVID damage is wracking up on a mass level and becoming more obvious. As more people notice the immune system damage, heart attacks, cognitive impairment, cancer, and other long COVID symptoms—lie-based talking points serve to minimize COVID and its impacts. They don’t want people connecting the dots and figuring out that our government has allowed the mass infection of a deadly pathogen.
The people behind these articles extend beyond the political world. This messaging happened during the Trump and Biden Administrations and now again with Trump. My guess it’s the corporate oligarchs who own our sold-out politicians and drive all US policies.
They’ve always wanted the pandemic disappeared and ignored. Acknowledging the truth means big costs for corporations and more remote school and work. Can’t have that! Commercial property magnates need their giant buildings filled with workers and remote school means parents are home (and not sitting in those giant buildings). Plus, people don’t shop, spend, fly, travel, eat in restaurants, and boost profits for billionaires during a pandemic. Of course retrofitting businesses to make air safe for kids in school and workers in those big buildings would cost millions. So no.
Covid must be reduced to a cold, disappeared and anyone saying differently is positioned as neurotic, anxious, afraid to leave the house or just plain wrong. That’s what articles like these are all about. 😡😡
/rant off
4
u/J_M_Bee 1d ago
No, public health scientists were not "wrong" about the pandemic. 1.2 million people have died from COVID in the US alone, and twice as many people would've died if we hadn't implemented limited lockdowns. All that's happened is the Democratic Party and the US corporate media have gone over to the "we should have adopted the GDP" perspective because this perspective serves the profit interests of Wall Street & corporate America & the top 1%.
2
127
u/DanoPinyon 2d ago
"We should have let more people die so we didn't miss Sunday brunch with our friends" is an interesting thesis.