NYT laying cover for COVID failures
This piece is something! If you were to write a list of every weak spot on COVID/vaccine failures and then write an article trying to spin it all away and lay cover, you would have this from David Wallace-Wells. That was clearly the task at hand. I appreciate that NYT still labels these opinions. Our purported “news” outlets have largely stopped doing that. Some of the lines in this are just incredible. The parts on Dr. Bhattacharya and the Great Barrington Declaration are disgusting and surreal to read.
This is a damn near open defense of the CCP’s broken and brutal policies. Note where the author choses to use “brutal” here though:
If we are trying to assess China’s “zero Covid” policy, we should have a clear picture of its vaccination failures rather than attributing the brutality of its current wave to decisions made three years ago.
It’s interesting that he frames this next one in D vs R. “Guaranteed demand”, oh you mean pro-mandates. He repeats that second line about government guarantees twice. He’s talking about the endless billions Team Biden wants to print for Big Pharma with prepurchased shots that few are taking. Just a month or so ago, they were still at like a staggering 90% stock. No one wants the boosters. I don’t blame them. Everyone has had COVID by now, for the most part. These are the same billions you heard the whole complex crying about when our politicians wisely said no. People like Andy Slavitt. I’m glad I’m not on Team D pulling these wizard strings:
On balance, then, we are seeing a test play out in real time. How much additional innovation can be unlocked simply through cutting red tape, and how much requires something more? That is: guaranteed money or guaranteed demand or both. In the absence of a new pandemic, it may be that government guarantees are the only tool that might create comparable ones. . . While bureaucracy may well slow development and rollout, removing those obstacles is not nearly as productive as conjuring up a market.
Read that again. It’s laying the case for more billions in prebuys for Big Pharma even outside of a pandemic. Mandates or guarantees, they want to feed the beast.
I found this passage interesting. Why was everything “absolutely central” then but not so much now? Remember when every news channel had the death ticker? I thought this same article said that we've lost even more people post-Omicron. But it’s like BLM in 2020, did police issues just stop in 2021? Of course not. Same thing here. The Truman Show is that powerful. It should still be front and central. We should be discussing actual science, baseless and failed policies like non-fitted and child masking or foreign vax mandate still in place, accurate analysis of threat level and medicine efficacy, how we unquestionably should have protected the vulnerable and not deployed uniform measures, etc etc. But you won’t be hearing any of those tunes from Mr. Wallace-Wells… or anyone from the NYT.
The whole time, the shape and near future of the pandemic seemed of absolutely central cultural interest and paramount importance, a top-shelf preoccupation of the news media and a running conversation subject on social channels. Three years ago, that sort of experience might have seemed to be too large for anyone to misperceive. Perhaps that was pandemic narcissism, too.
I definitely agree on the narcissism.