The COVID-19 pandemic ended for me on May 28, 2020, almost three months into the state-mandated lockdowns, social distancing, and masking. That was the day I saw the same elected leaders and public health officials who had taken away almost all of my freedoms look the other way when Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa took control of American cities and burned major parts of them to the ground.
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf wouldn’t let my wife see her dying father in the hospital or more directly manage his care — which became deplorable once hospital staff knew family couldn’t come in and check on them. Wolf's public health experts told us if we so much as breathed while singing in church we could kill someone’s grandmother, and then he participated in a BLM march, violating any number of his pandemic dictates.
Hypocrisy: Gov. Tom Wolf marches with George Floyd protesters ‘to show solidarity’ despite pandemic via @washtimes https://t.co/lMPjol7iVp https://t.co/lMPjol7iVp pic.twitter.com/FbogvIAgOV
— Chris Alan (@ChrisAlanjo03) June 5, 2020
I had made up my mind on COVID-19 before I saw this photo, but this one cemented it for me. The same man who said I couldn’t be in a group of 25 or more people marched and encouraged the marching of thousands of people. The same man who said I had to limit my contact with non-family members, and whose administration said I couldn’t get any closer than six feet away from someone else, was marching arm-in-arm with total strangers. What a joke. And the joke was on me and everyone else who had to follow his rules.
Lest we forget, in Pennsylvania, we weren’t allowed in rooms the size of a large auditorium or banquet space with more than 25 people. Masking was mandated, even outdoors in some places. To work outside the home, you had to be deemed “essential,” like a nurse or a liquor store clerk. No in-person office work, no in-person schooling, no in-person worship. But if you wanted to participate in a little “peaceful protesting” by looting the nearest electronics store, have at it.
This is one of the more blatant examples of how the media tried to gaslight us into believing that the 2020 summer of love was “mostly peaceful protests,” this one being in Kenosha, Wis., in August of that year.
All of this while law-abiding, obedient Americans hid in their homes from a form of the flu with a 99% survival rate.
I didn’t wait until August to decide the pandemic was over. Whatever compliant things I did, like wearing a mask in a grocery store, stopped on May 28. No more mask for me. No more social distancing. No more compliance.
While I couldn’t open up the stores or the places I wanted to go, I decided I didn’t need to stay at home under Anthony Fauci’s and Gov. Wolf’s orders. Not to mention that this strange creature was the Pennsylvania public health czar at the time.
In 2020, Rachel Levine sent COVID positive patients to Pennsylvania nursing homes while making sure his own mother was removed from an elderly facility.
— Meg Brock (@MegEBrock) November 7, 2024
As a result, COVID spread like wildfire in nursing homes, driving up COVID case numbers which were then used to justify… pic.twitter.com/cw7iYG7EhD
My wife started to force her way into facilities that “cared” for her dying father as much as possible, and it still wasn’t enough. We didn’t cancel a wedding in our family, and instead held it outdoors with more people on hand than what the governor would have approved. And not one person there wore a mask or social distanced.
On social media and in my real life, when I started to follow the lead of those BLM protestors by not obeying the health establishment — without the rioting, looting and arson — a rift emerged between me and some friends and family. After those George Floyd riots started, the lines between common-sense, independent-minded Americans and the more obedient and compliant members of society became more pronounced.
Those who allowed fear and a desire to conform to control them became more resentful of those of us who did not. Some of that persists to this day.
But it wasn’t just the public tenor that ended the pandemic for me. In my work, I had handled the crisis response for a hospital, a transit system, and a couple of other organizations that had to manage their own response to the pandemic.
I’d like to be able to say I got a glimpse behind the curtain, but for the most part there was no curtain to look behind. Society moved in unison under the dictatorial control of the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the state health departments. Once one international or federal agency issued a dictate, everyone else followed it, no questions asked.
In the process, I watched and studied how the public health establishment was handling the crisis communications element from the very start of the pandemic lockdowns in March 2020, and I was horrified. Every tenet of responsible crisis communications was turned on its head.
Typically, the first rule is to work to remain calm and to calm the public. The reason is simple. No matter how bad things are or could be, a panicked public doesn’t listen, and it doesn’t cooperate. Panic creates an unsafe environment. But in 2020, the public health authorities were actively trying to gin up panic, justifying this by saying this was necessary to get people to pay attention. That was an institutional lie, and I had concluded so pretty quickly.
The second rule is to try to stick to verifiable facts in communication, and not rely on emotion or partial information, which would only add to rumor-mongering, speculation, and the spread of actual misinformation. But the public health establishment all of a sudden dismissed decades-old conventional wisdom on things like herd immunity, the efficacy of masks, and quarantine procedures.
Prior to COVID-19, if you were sick, you self-quarantined. If you were not sick, you didn’t. But with COVID-19, the public health establishment told you that if you had no symptoms, you really had to quarantine, because you were most dangerous. Words like “asymptomatic” were used to label healthy, non-infected people as pariahs. Gaslighting once again? Yes. And it was disgusting.
If you worked in crisis management then, and you kept your head about you (not all of my peers did), you saw plainly that the public health establishment was conducting a grand experiment that had nothing to do with containing a virus. It had more to do with the engineering of mass psychosis.
By May 28, 2020, all of this was clear to me, and as other events and developments would unfold later in the year and into 2021, everything just reaffirmed what some of us already knew the day those George Floyd protests started.
The pandemic, for how it was billed, was over. After that, I couldn't unsee it for what it was — a naked power grab. I'm not denying that a novel virus was spreading. It was. But the public health establishment's response was nothing less than a massive, complex campaign to manipulate the people so as to put power into the hands of the last people on earth who ever should have had power.
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